^>--'-^-l >%>"1S3P» psoa^ 



■ '?:/..■:& 



m 



'^-y 









;!^-- 



- 




;> ' > ; 



ff^Sm 






^w 







~> > 



3> >- u> - 



J LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



31 









CftfL/t. 



BD 






> 



UNITED STATES .OF AMERICA, f 



l[Q)%>^>^-m>-^w'%>'%^><»,<%>-%,<s>'%,-% > <%,'^,<^<^ > q 






"'? :> :-£r. 





^ * 




^*- 




>k 




-i* 


V 


^. 




*gi 


Js! 6 


pk 


3hl 







ia^ 


^ :rS V^B> 


St"?^ 



Z3HpT?. 




^m^ 
"&»~ 







2a> ~»> 






3> . 52I> 



JPP;;-: V £ 


^s> -• 


V • 


W> ! 5 


» • E3S 


!>■ -2i3 


» i3R 


Sr>23 


1 ' \£m> 


.:'^> 


j> 


>[J3» 


:^3> 


^ !£>' 


:38> 


j>>_jr> 


->3* ■> 


!C* 


->&■ :•> 


iS3» 






s» -^» Viz*. ==3» 

:2Bk> Z£> "> a» — -» 


gfggp Lj» jg 


> """""t» 


Q»J£3K> ^> i * 


*'_33 










'wm< 



THE 



WORLD OF MIND, 



AN ELEMENTARY BOOK. 



1/ 

Y ISAAC TAYLOR, 

AUTHOR OP "WESLEY AND METHOT>ISM." 



NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

1858. 



<& 



3 * 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/worldofmindeleme01tayl 



PREFACE. 



Throughout the course of the years that have 
elapsed since the publication of a small volume, " El- 
ements of Thought," I have held in view the purpose 
of following it by another on the same subjects, but 
treated more at large. A time of absolute leisure, 
fitted for the due performance of such a task, I have 
waited for and never found. 

Yet, in place of a continuous season of leisure, there 
has been given me the leisure moments and the hours 
of many thoughtful years. During these years the 
principal subjects of Intellectual Philosophy have been 
constantly in my prospect, and the volume which is 
now offered to the public is the fruit of these medita- 
tions in this lapse of time. 

Intending to put into the reader's hand an element- 
ary book of moderate size, such subjects only are in- 
troduced as might be presented apart from controver- 
sial references to books, either of the present time or 
of times past. Any such references, to be servicea- 
ble to the uninitiated reader, must be ample and com- 
prehensive, and would demand space very far exceed- 
ing that to which I have here confined myself. 



iv PBEFACE. 

The present volume embraces only a portion of 
those subjects that should find a place in a course of 
elementary reading in Mental Philosophy. I still 
keep in view what would give completeness to -the 
plan that has been so long projected. 

I. T. 

Stanford Rivers, November, 1857. 



CONTENTS. 



SECTION PAGE 

I, Statement of the Subject 7 

II. Distribution of the Subject 23 

III. METAPHYSICS: Ultimate Abstractions 26 

IV. Metaphysics: Mixed Abstractions 44 

V. Metaphysics: Concretive Abstractions 56 

VI. Metaphysics: The Sense of Fitness and Order 64 

VTI. Metaphysics : Grounds of Certainty in relation to Meta- 
physical Speculation 70 

VIII. SCIENCE OF MIND— PHYSICAL.— The Boundary 

between Animal Physiology and the Science of Mind 96 

LX. Breadth of the World of Mind..... 104 

X. Rudiments of Mind 131 

XI. The Point of Divergence of the Higher and the Lower 

Orders of Mind..... 145 

XII. Intellectual Emotions and their Results 153 

XIII. Contingent Development of the Intellectual Faculties.. 181 

XTV. Language as related to Mental Operations 189 

XV. Relative Value of Certain Terms 205 

XVI. The Emotions: Distribution of the Subject 217 

XVII. Emotions related to the Individual Well-Being 224 

XVIII. Cementing Emotions of the Social System 246 

XLX. Antagonistic Emotions of the Social System 277 

XX. Emotions and Tastes related to the Modulations of 

Sound 288 

XXI. Emotions and Tastes related to the Objects of Sight.... 297 
XXII. The Relations of the Human Mind to the Unknown and 

the Infinite 314 

XXIH. Genera and Species in the World of Mind 329 

XXIV. Laughter and Weeping 350 

XXV. Summary 358 



THE 



WORLD OF MIND. 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 

1. A definition can be strictly applicable only 
when the subject to which it relates is thoroughly 
known to us. But the subject now before us includes 
much that is obscure, and to many of the questions 
which meet us on this ground a conjectural answer 
only can be given ; we therefore abstain from attempt- 
ing that which, though it might be precise and exact 
as to the terms employed, must assume more than is 
certain, and would so far be delusive. 

2. In place of a formal definition of what we intend 
by the word Mind, or by the phrase the World of 
Mind, I offer a descriptive statement, which at least 
will serve to mark off our proper subject, and to keep 
it apart from other subjects to which it stands related, 
and with which it is very liable to be confounded. A 
descriptive statement, such as we have now in view, 
must not be regarded as if it were dependent, in any 
rigid manner, upon the precise words that may be em- 
ployed to convey it. Language must not affect to 
teach more than is actually known. 



8 THK WOELD OF MIND. 

3. Mind, so far as we are cognizant of it by our in- 
dividual consciousness, and by our intercourse with 
those like ourselves, and by observation of the various 
orders of animated beings around us, although it is 
conjoined with an animal organization, is always clear- 
ly distinguishable therefrom as the subject of intellect- 
ual science. But when we attempt to describe it, we 
can only do so as if it were one with that animal frame- 
work, apart from which we have no direct knowledge 
of it in any way or in any single instance. 

4. Mind, as conjoined with an animal organization, 
is that which lives, not merely as vegetable structures 
live, but more than this ; for it is related to the outer 
world by organs of sensation : it moves, and it moves 
from place to place by an impulse originating within 
itself; and it has also a consciousness, more or less 
distinct, of its own existence ; that is to say, it pos- 
sesses, in a greater or less degree, a reflective life, and 
it is capable of enjoyment and of suffering. 

5. The woeld op Mind comprehends all orders of 
beings that exhibit those conditions of life which we 
here specify. The world of Mind is, therefore, a wide 
world ; it constitutes a community that is incalculably 
extended and multiplied on all sides ; it is a commu- 
nity in the midst of which the human species stands 
as an exceptive instance, in two respects broadly 
marked — first, by the vast interval which separates it 
from the classes next below itself on the scale of fac- 
ulty or power ; and, secondly, in a numerical sense, 
for this higher order of Mind is but as one to millions, 
incalculably many, of the inferior rank. 

6. "When we attempt to mark off the world of Mind 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 9 

on the side bordering toward the lower orders of life 
— namely, the vegetative — some ambiguity attaches to 
many of the instances which present themselves on 
that margin. But the question which often perplexes 
the physiologist, when he inquires, concerning this or 
that species, whether it should be accounted animal or 
vegetable, is wholly unimportant in relation to our 
present subject. We do not concern ourselves with 
Mind until it comes to manifest itself clearly by its 
own distinctive characteristics ; and these, if we as- 
cend a few steps only on the scale of animated being, 
become so strongly marked as to preclude all uncer- 
tainty. 

7. Then, as we thus ascend, step by step, upon this 
scale, we find ourselves in the company of beings whose 
actions, and whose modes of adapting themselves to 
the influences and the accidents of the external world, 
are readily interpretable by means of our own con- 
sciousness and our own modes of action. This crite- 
rion, if there were no other, would sufficiently serve 
the purpose of assigning any particular class of beings 
to its due place, as belonging to the upper or to the 
lower orders. It is by this rule of analogy that we 
admit any species into the community of Mind, or dis- 
allow its claims to this distinction. 

8. When the orders around us are considered phys- 
iologically as distributable into classes, genera, spe- 
cies, according to their visible characteristics, they are 
incalculably many ; but if we pay attention to the very 
same classes of beings, ceasing to regard their contour 
and their animal structure, and if we think only of 
those elements of Mind that are indicated in their in- 

A 2 



10 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

stincts, their habits, and their spontaneous movements, 
it will appear that the grounds of distinction among 
them are exceedingly few. Physiologically, the or- 
ders, the classes, the genera, and the species are count- 
less ; considered as belonging to the community of 
Mind, these same varieties fall under four or five class- 
es. Those visible and palpable differences of form 
and structure which it is the business of the naturalist 
to take account of, do not go deep into the framework 
of the animal system, nor touch the constitution of the 
mind ; genera and species belong to the shell of life, 
not to its kernel. 

9. The distinction here made between the animal 
structure, with its specific contour, and its functions, 
and the Mind, is the ground of a distinction that is 
sometimes lost sight of between what belongs to phys- 
iology and what comes properly within the limits of 
the Science of Mind. The two sciences — the physio- 
logical and the mental — do indeed run parallel through- 
out almost their entire course, and they often intersect 
each other ; and they seem to be so intimately blend- 
ed that to distinguish the one from the other is some- 
times barely possible. Nevertheless, as we shall see, 
they are two sciences, not one ; and the facts belong- 
ing to each are susceptible of distinct treatment. A 
clear perception of this essential difference presents it- 
self as one of the most important of those ends which 
should be aimed at in an elementary book upon intel- 
lectual philosophy. It is not merely confusion of 
thought, but a crowd of positive errors, that springs 
from inattention to this distinction. 

10. Man — beyond comparison, and with a vast in- 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 11 

terval between him and the animal orders around him 
— takes the highest place in the world of Mind, so far 
as that world is known to us. But the curious ques- 
tion presents itself, Is he, indeed, the chief in that 
community ? Conjectures, founded upon those analo- 
gies which we see to abound in the material system, 
present themselves on this ground, in support of a be- 
lief that there are orders of beings as much superior 
to man as he is superior to others. Now it is not the 
office of science to step forward and contradict any 
surmises of this sort ; in truth, science must violate 
its own rules, and must become conjectural, before it 
could make any such attempt. But then these con- 
jectures, or any hypothesis concerning an intellectual 
community existing beyond, or beside, or above the 
human system, do not come within the range of scien- 
tific inquiry. This is a caution which should be early 
given, and should always be kept in view. Science 
has to do with facts, and with those inferences from 
facts which may be derived from them on warrantable 
principles of reasoning. 

11. A uniform adherence to this rule will enable us 
to steer clear of controversies, the introduction of which 
has given color to the supposition that intellectual 
philosophy is concerned with obscure, indeterminate, 
and indeterminable questions, that are equally fruit- 
less and hopeless of any intelligible result. 

12. In this place we need only mention two such 
controversies, in which, though they are as ancient as 
human speculation, no progress has hitherto been made 
toward the solution of the problem they profess to deal 
with. On each side an hypothesis is assumed, which, 



12 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

as it can neither be proved nor disproved in a conclu- 
sive manner, leaves the two standing to threaten each 
other with demolition. While they do so, the two 
neutralize each other as to any influence they might 
exert upon the course of science. Thus, on one side, 
it has been maintained that THOUGHT, or MIND, is noth- 
ing more than a function of the animal organization ; 
that consciousness, feeling, reason, are secretions from 
the brain and nervous substance throughout the body, 
and that, therefore, the alleged distinction between ani- 
mal physiology and the science of Mind is illusory, 
or that it can be admitted only as a matter of conven- 
ience in teaching dissimilar portions of the one philos- 
ophy of animal life. On the other side, it has been 
affirmed, and at least with an equal show of reason, 
that the material world, with its imagined organiza- 
tion, is a supposition only — an hypothesis, of which 
there is, and can be, no proof. Mind, it is said — 
thought and feeling — is the one and only substance ; 
it is the one and only reality in the universe. The 
external world, as we call it, is a function of Mind, or 
it is one. of its products. On this theory, as well as 
on the one above mentioned, the alleged distinction 
between animal physiology and the science of Mind 
must be considered as unreal, and it can be admitted 
only for convenience sake in treating various portions 
of the one philosophy of human nature. 

13. Hitherto, and after centuries of acute disputa- 
tion, no decision has been arrived at between these 
antagonistic theories ; nor are they susceptible of a com- 
promise. There is now as little prospect as ever there 
has been of our reaching a conclusion which shall be 



STATEMENT OP THE SUBJECT. 13 

generally assented to. Yet, in the present tendency 
of philosophical inquiry, there is a good prospect of 
what would be equivalent to a termination of the de- 
bate, namely, a clear perception, on all sides, of the 
fact, that neither of these theories can, in any appreci- 
able manner, interfere with, or in the least degree con- 
trol, the course of genuine science. On either hy- 
pothesis we shall be called to give attention to the 
very same facts, and then we must reason concerning 
them on the very same principles, and, at length, we 
must come to the very same conclusions. This in- 
consequence of the two theories will become still more 
manifest as we advance. The two theories will come 
to be considered in their place, among other curious 
and barren products of the abstractive faculty. 

14. When it is affirmed — as we now affirm — that 
within the regions of intellectual philosophy we are 
occupied with facts, and with warrantable inferences 
from facts, it must not be supposed that, in this de- 
partment, the same approach toward indisputable con- 
clusions has been made as in the mathematical, or even 
in the physical sciences. This is far from being true. 
Although, in one sense, we know more of Mind than 
we can ever know of matter, in another sense we know 
much less ; or, rather, there is, on this ground, less of 
that sort of knowledge which can be reported and spread 
out to view in a distinct manner. In all departments 
of philosophy, human curiosity is stopped at an earlier 
or at a later stage by an impassable barrier — it meets 
what is inscrutable. The constitution of the elements 
in the material world is inscrutable ; the gravitating 
force, and the principle of chemical affinity, and the 



14 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

nature of light, and the principle of vegetative life, 
these things are utterly inscrutable ; so, also, is the 
principle of animal life ; and so, in like manner, hut 
not more so, is Mind. At all these points alike,- and 
as to each of them for the same reasons, we reach a 
limit which the human mind has never yet passed. 
But it is not true that Mind is more occult, as to its 
inner nature, than is matter, or than the principle of 
vegetative and animal life ; they are exactly as much 
so, and not more. But there is here a difference to 
he noted which must not Tbe lost sight of: 

15. In all departments of the physical sciences and 
of natural history, the facts which we have to do with 
are various and countless ; and they are also definite, 
and palpable, and visible : it becomes our business to 
classify innumerable forms — and each attractive in its 
way — and to ascertain the diversified functions of many 
orders of organized beings. In each department of 
these sciences, whoever devotes himself to it finds that 
there is before him the occupation of a life. He knows, 
indeed, that a mystery which he will never penetrate 
stands in advance of him, but then it is placed at the 
remote end of his inquiries ; if, once and again, he 
looks out toward it, he is quickly called off from the 
pursuit of a fruitless speculation, and he gladly returns 
to a field of profitable labor and inquiry — a field on 
which there are inexhaustible riches to be gathered 
and housed. 

16. In the region of intellectual philosophy, the 
whole aspect of things is of another sort, for in this 
department the facts we have to do with are few, and, 
in the mode in which the science is usually presented, 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 15 

these few facts assume a very meagre appearance. 
Moreover, there is much on this ground that is dimly 
seen and that is confusedly apprehended ; and then, 
at the last, the matured fruits of much patient thought 
must be consigned to popular language, which, at the 
best, is a precarious medium for the conveyance of ab- 
stract notions. 

17. Hence it is that, at an early stage of our prog- 
ress on this ground, we feel as if we had exhausted 
our materials, and must go in quest of occupation. 
We soon find ourselves, therefore, in front of that bar- 
rier which, in the departments of physics, of chemistry, 
of physiology, and of natural history, is always a long 
way in advance of our position, while we are occupied 
with what engages every faculty. In the philosophy 
of Mind we become impatient to push forward, and 
yet find that we can not do so. We are apt, there- 
fore, to imagine that much more of mystery attaches 
to the world of Mind than belongs to the world of 
matter; or that, while the visible universe may be 
freely explored in all directions, a pall which we can 
never lift rests upon the intellectual universe. We 
shall see that this is not the fact. The mystery is 
just as dark in the one case as it is in the other ; the 
ultimate problem which, on all sides, arrests human 
curiosity, is as insoluble in the one case as it is in the 
other; the only difference is this — that, in the one 
case, it stands so near to us as to overshadow our 
meditations and to chill our energies, while, in the 
other case, it is seen only as a cloud in the horizon. 

18. We have mentioned a disadvantage which is 
inseparable from our present subject, arising from the 



16 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

unfixedness of the symbols which we are compelled to 
employ, namely, the terms of popular parlance. When 
facts that are indistinctly apprehended come to be dis- 
coursed about in terms of uncertain or of variable im- 
port, there must be large room for interminable con- 
troversy. Then, besides these occasions of debate, 
there is this — that, although intellectual philosophy 
demands certain qualities of mind which are not the 
most ordinary for its successful prosecution, it tempts 
many to enter upon it who are neither able nor are 
disposed to confine themselves to a strict scientific 
style : it is a field open to all, and which is wandered 
over by many who have little natural aptitude for pur- 
suits of this kind. 

19. Treatises upon the physical sciences are usual- 
ly introduced by historic notices of the progress of 
discovery in that department from the earliest ages up 
to the present time, but in these preliminary surveys 
several theories and systems, long ago superseded, are 
disposed of within the compass of a paragraph or two. 
These antiquated theories have now no adherents, and 
we do ample justice to them in a page. It is not so 
within the precincts upon which we are about to en- 
ter. The earliest developments of thought on this 
ground still possess a claim to be listened to, for they 
may be as good as some of later date, and they may 
be preferable to the very last that have appeared. A 
consciousness of this fact, on the part of those who 
profess intellectual philosophy, has induced most of 
them to treat the science historically and critically 
rather than in a direct and didactic manner ; they have 
not merely reported ancient opinions, but have thought 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 17 

it incumbent upon them to discuss their merits, ap- 
proving or disallowing each scheme as it passes in re- 
view. 

20. But this retrospective style, which must be pro- 
lix, and which is likely to be wearisome to the general 
reader, is far from being adapted to the purposes of an 
elementary book. Nothing of the sort, therefore, is 
attempted in this volume. It must, however, be un- 
derstood and supposed, first, that the writer of such a 
book has acquainted himself with his subject histor- 
ically ; and, secondly, that he fairly puts his readers 
into position for understanding more elaborate works 
on the same subject, if any of them should wish to 
acquaint themselves with it hereafter in a more careful 
and ample manner. 

21. From what has been here said of the unfixed- 
ness of intellectual philosophy, and of its being open 
to controversies which are revived from time to time, 
it must not be inferred that every thing is vague and 
undetermined within its precincts. This is not the 
fact. The advance and consolidation of the physical 
sciences have given an indirect, and yet an effective 
impulse in the right direction to the science of Mind : 
a real progress has been made ; an advanced position 
has been attained, from which we are not likely to be 
dislodged. Certain illusory and sophistical systems 
have nearly fallen out of esteem, and perhaps will nev- 
er regain their influence. At this time, therefore, there 
may be gathered, from the works of modern writers 
on intellectual philosophy, what might be called a 
catholic belief concerning the intellectual and moral 
constitution of man. These appreciable advances to- 



18 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

ward an accepted system warrant the expectation that 
more will yet be done to give the subject that coher- 
ence and fixedness which shall entitle it to a place 
among established sciences. 

22. It is reasonable to ask, With what specific in- 
tention is it that we should enter upon the ground 
which is now before us ? What fruit are we likely to 
gather in our course over it ? and what relation does 
the science of Mind bear, either toward other sciences, 
or toward the practical purposes of life ? In giving 
an answer to questions of this kind (in any depart- 
ment of philosophy), those who profess to teach it are 
indulged with the liberty to say every thing that can 
with an appearance of reason be alleged in its recom- 
mendation, and to enhance, as far as possible, as well 
the intrinsic as the relative importance of the studies 
to which they have devoted themselves for life. The 
professors of intellectual philosophy have usually avail- 
ed themselves of this license, and they have labored to 
establish the opinion that many extensive reforms and 
improvements — in education, in politics, in social econ- 
omy, and in morals ; in law, and in theology— would 
result from a more general and a more serious pursuit 
of it than is usual. Were this noble science — the 
first of the sciences — say they, to be listened to as it 
ought, the above-named sciences and social arts would 
take a new start, and would diffuse unthought-of bless- 
ings on all sides. 

23. ISTo professions of this sort will be made in the 
present instance, for, in truth, the writer entertains no 
such exalted belief. Nevertheless, he attaches to his 
subject a real importance, and he is fully of opinion 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 19 

that it deserves and that it would repay much more 
attention than it generally receives, and particularly 
that it might, with great advantage, be employed as a 
means or an instrument of education during the later 
years of a course of study. It is greatly with a view 
to this purpose that this elementary book is put into 
the reader's hand. 

24. Something still more definite than this may 
fairly be said in recommending our subject to the in- 
telligent reader. In several instances, the indirect ef- 
fects of a course of study are of more importance than 
any direct benefits which it may seem to hold forth 
as the ends or reasons why it should be prosecuted. 
This, undoubtedly, may be affirmed of classical stud- 
ies. The direct advantages of a knowledge of the lan- 
guages of ancient Greece and Rome are few, or they 
are such as attach only to certain professions. But 
when they are regarded as supplying the means of cul- 
ture and refinement, no other pursuits can come in the 
place of them. A system of education which ex- 
cludes a knowledge of Latin and Greek may meet the 
occasions of common life well enough, but it can never 
impart refined tastes, or give a full expansion to the 
intellect. 

25. As much as this, or nearly as much, may be 
affirmed in behalf of intellectual philosophy. The hu- 
man mind, in the study of its own structure, elabo- 
rates its faculties. In these studies its native forces 
are augmented, and habits are acquired more exact 
and more refined than such as are formed either by a 
mathematical training or in the pursuit of physical 
science. If, therefore, we should fail to make a good 



20 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

plea for these studies on the ground of their direct 
practical utility, we should certainly succeed in recom- 
mending them as among the best means of intellectual 
culture. On this sure ground, therefore, it is well to 
take our stand. In religion, in politics, in social econ- 
omy, the current of public thought runs strong, and it 
is seldom influenced, in any appreciable manner, this 
way or that, by forces so attenuated as are those of in- 
tellectual philosophy. Nevertheless, it is true that 
some men — a few they will be as compared with the 
mass — may, in these studies, find the means of ex- 
empting themselves, individually, from the violences 
of that current, and may, from this higher ground, take 
a wider survey of social interests. 

26. But to some minds mental science will be more 
than a temporary means of intellectual culture ; it will 
be more than a method of training resorted to in the 
years that precede a man's entrance upon the business 
of life. The world of Mind will be the home of 
thought to a few, and especially it will become such if 
the breadth, the height, the depth of this universe of 
life are fairly opened up, and if, in the place of the eva- 
nescent subtilties of a cold, analysis, there is brought 
before us the boundless objects of that great system 
throughout which the energies of conscious life are in 
course of development. If the phrase were used in an 
emphatic sense, then we should say that the world of 
Mind is the real world ; and if only it be set forth in 
its vastness and variety, it will draw toward itself 
those spirits that are the most alive, and with whom 
feeling, and volition, and power — consciousness, and 
reflective action, and progress, are the characteristics 



STATEMENT OF THE SUBJECT. 21 

of the individual. As it is the distinction of man that 
he turns his thoughts inward upon the centre or source 
of thought, so it is the characteristic of a few minds 
that this intensity of life is with them their normal 
condition : they are reflective, by eminence, among their 
fellows, just as man is distinctively reflective among 
the orders around him. 

27. We have said above (17) that because, in the 
department of mental philosophy, we sooner than in 
the physical sciences arrive at that barrier beyond 
which the human faculties make no progress, there en- 
sues an unfounded supposition that a mysteriousness 
attaches to the former from which the latter are ex- 
empt. We have shown how it is that this illusory 
notion springs up. But having arisen, it is always 
likely to float about in the regions upon which we are 
entering. The hold it takes upon minds that are mys- 
tically disposed is strengthened by the imperfections 
of language. Now, therefore, when we are asking what 
are those useful purposes which may be secured by 
making acquaintance with intellectual philosophy, our 
answer is this : that, in doing so, we set ourselves free, 
or may do so, from the influence of this and similar il- 
lusions, and thus we may stand safe in regard to those 
bootless speculations which from time to time threaten 
the subversion of the most momentous truths. 

28. Let it be well understood — once for all, and so 
that we shall not be compelled to retrace our steps — 
that the unfathomable abyss toward the brink of which 
the human mind is ever tempted to draw near is as 
close at hand in the fields of physical science as it is 
in the field of intellectual philosophy ; only that, in 



22 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

the former, we are longer detained from looking down 
into it, and are more easily diverted from our purpose, 
and are sooner induced to draw "back from the border. 
If we convince ourselves of this fact — and we may 
easily do so — then the one region of philosophy be- 
comes as clear from clouds, and as open and safe, as 
the other. There are no mysteries on this ground if 
we do not make them, or there are none with which 
we need concern ourselves, if only we adhere to the 
authentic and universally-admitted rules and practices 
of modern science. 

29. Still it must be so that to some this region will 
be a haunted ground. The questions that meet us 
stimulate curiosity in minds that are constitutionally 
inapt for abstract thought, or are incapable of strict 
analysis, and which quickly lose their grasp of what, 
for a moment, they have apprehended. Minds distin- 
guished more by ardor than by strength, more excur- 
sive than analytic, are apt to imagine, at every turn, 
that a startling discovery is opening before them, and 
that to-morrow they shall be able to lift the veil which 
so long has concealed " the hidden nature of things." 
Do we ask, then, what is the utility of the studies 
upon which we are entering ? This if no other useful 
result may be secured, namely, an exemption from the 
invasions of lawless and interminable speculation. 



DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 23 



II. 

DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 

30. In an elementary book, the rule of convenience 
in the order of subjects is usually of more importance 
than any imaginary good resulting from a strict ad- 
herence to a more exact or logical method. I shall 
follow this rule in the present instance, and shall 
adopt an arrangement which, as I believe, will be ad- 
vantageous to the reader, although it deviates from the 
direct path. 

31. Looking to subjects of all kinds which ordinarily 
take a place within the circle of intellectual philosophy, 
they present themselves as susceptible of an obvious 
distribution under three heads, as thus : there are sub- 
jects belonging properly to the physiology of mind, 
or psychology, as it is now called ; such are what- 
ever relates to sensation, perception, memory, and the 
like ; secondly, themes of a more abstruse kind, and 
which may be designated as metaphysical : the terms 
space, time, cause, and effect, belong to this depart- 
ment ; thirdly, there is what constitutes the science 
and the art of logic, which undertakes to show the 
methods best adapted to the acquisition and to the 
conveyance of knowledge, as well as the methods of 
reasoning and of philosophizing in all the sciences : 
the terms induction, deduction, syllogism, evidence, 
doubt, belief, and the like, belong to this third de- 
partment. 



24 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

32. This same distribution of subjects (adopted in 
a book long ago published*) I propose now to adhere 
to, with this difference only, that we shall take up the 
three in a different order. Metaphysical abstractions 
are a product of the human Mind when the faculty of 
abstraction has been called into exercise, and has de- 
veloped itself in some good degree.; therefore, in 
strictness, it could only claim a subordinate place in a 
scheme of mental science, for the subjects it includes 
are fruits or results of a certain mental faculty. But, 
in like manner, the pure mathematics might be so re- 
garded, for these also are a product of the same faculty, 
although employed in a different direction, and as con- 
fined to a particular class of ideas — those of number 
and extension; therefore this body of determinate 
thought might be challenged to come into its place, 
and might be required to contain itself within a chap- 
ter of a treatise on mental science. But a method of 
proceeding such as this would be highly inconvenient ; 
nor could any thing that might be said in favor of its 
logical fitness reconcile us to so arbitrary a course. 

33. Whatever the human mind has wrought out of 
its own stores, or chiefly so, by the exercise of its in- 
herent powers, and with little aid from the outer world, 
might, on the same principle, if strictly applied, be 
assigned to its place in a comprehensive scheme of 
mental philosophy. All those products of reason 
which place man, when cultured, in a position im- 
measurably in advance of the animal orders around 
him, are the fruit of processes of thought, in the course 
of which the Mind — not, indeed, as if disjoined from 

* Elements of Thought. 



DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 25 

the material world, but yet as holding itself off from 
it — works with, and upon itself, bringing itself to a 
bearing upon the external world, indirectly only, or as 
if at nodes of its orbit. 

34. In prosecuting the physical sciences, we employ 
ourselves upon objects or phenomena concerning which 
we can know nothing by anticipation, or any otherwise 
than by observation and experiment ; and while ac- 
quiring, in this way, what we come to learn of the 
material universe, the Mind employs its faculties un- 
consciously as to the mechanism of its own powers : 
it would be absurd, therefore, as well as inconvenient, 
to bring the physical sciences into their places as chap- 
ters in a scheme of mental philosophy. 

35. Equally inconvenient would it be, and. yet not 
in the same sense absurd, to bring mathematical sci- 
ence into its place in such a scheme. Less inconven- 
ient, and, on some accounts, reasonable, would it be 
so to treat metaphysical abstractions. Yet there is a 
reason sufficient for keeping these also apart, and for 
regarding them as entitled to an independent treatment. 
In like manner as we conceive of the relations of ex- 
tension and number as having an eternal reality, and 
accept them as truths unchangeably certain, even if 
there were no material world, and if there were no cre- 
ated intelligences to apprehend them, so, as to those 
abstract notions which are embraced in the circle of 
metaphysical sciences, we imagine them to be un- 
changeably true, and believe that they must remain 
what they are, although all minds also were to become 
extinct. This, at least, must' be said, that these ab- 
stract principles have an aspect of independent and 



26 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

unchangeable reality, such as compels us to conceive 
of them in this way. 

36. We give to Metaphysics the foremost place in 
this elementary book for this reason — that if we suc- 
ceed in setting the subject clear of mystification, and 
if we lay down a safe road on the border of abysses, 
real or imaginary, our after-course will be much less 
perplexing than otherwise it might be. We do not 
commence with a profession that we shall be able to 
send a plumb-line into the depths of speculative phi- 
losophy, but this we may do — we may show a margin- 
ground upon which we may walk with satisfaction. 

37. The order of subjects, therefore, is this : First, 
we take in hand those abstract notions which belong 
to Metaphysics ; and this initial work may quickly be 
dispatched. Secondly, we shall have before us a wide 
field — the physiology of Mind — Mind as known to us 
on all sides. Thirdly, Logic will come to be consid- 
ered, or, rather, the methods of reasoning proper to 
different subjects. 



III. 
METAPHYSICS : 

ULTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS. 



38. The popular belief concerning the subjects 
which are now immediately before us is this — that 
they are in an extreme degree difficult of apprehen- 
sion ; that they are obscure, indeterminate, and such 
as can be attractive to none but a vei-y few whose 
minds are peculiarly constituted. 



METAPHYSICS : ULTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS. 27 

39. A supposition of this kind is so far well found- 
ed as this — that metaphysical notions are not to be 
distinctly apprehended without some effort of attention 
or labor ; and it is for this very reason that they may, 
with so much advantage, be made use of as a means 
of intellectual discipline. Further than this, the pop- 
ular belief is well founded ; for it must be granted that, 
when metaphysical problems are treated controversial- 
ly, and critically, and historically, the discussion of 
them drags itself out to great length, and it is apt to 
become, at every stage, less and less intelligible, and 
less and less attractive, except to a very few. 

40. It is, or it may be, otherwise if only the limits 
of the human faculties in this region are seen and are 
regarded ; if verbiage be avoided, if brevity be studied, 
and especially if a writer in this department be free 
from the ambition to create for himself a reputation as 
a discoverer or as a reformer. In this case metaphys- 
ical science may be simplified, and it may be brought 
within narrow limits. 

41. Great freedom in the use of language may safe- 
ly be admitted in treating the physical sciences, be- 
cause the things which are spoken of are near at hand 
— visibly or palpably, whether they be material ele- 
ments or organized bodies, so that if any ambiguity 
has had place, it may at once be dispelled by a refer- 
ence to the objects or the phenomena in question. In 
mathematical reasoning, no license or freedom what- 
ever in the employment of its symbols can be allowed, 
or, indeed, could be desired ; for these symbols having 
a fixed connection with the quantities or with the re- 
lations which they represent, the certainty of the proc- 



28 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

ess of reasoning, in any case, depends upon an un- 
deviating adherence to the value and meaning of each 
term. 

42. In treating metaphysical abstractions, we can 
neither avail ourselves of the advantage of making a 
reference continually to things visible, concerning 
which we are reasoning, as we do in the physical sci- 
ences, nor, on the other hand, can we go on with a 
chain of demonstrations without any such reference, 
as in mathematical reasoning. For on this ground, 
that is to say, when we are carrying on any process 
of thought concerning purely abstract notions, ordi- 
nary language, which is our only medium, is not sus- 
ceptible of any such fixedness and precision as be- 
longs to geometric and arithmetical symbols. The 
remedies applicable to these inconveniences are two : 
the first is, to study perspicuity and simplicity in 
style ; and the second is, to be on our guard, at every 
step, against the easily-besetting error of supposing 
that, by means of some newly-phrased expression of 
abstract notions, we have penetrated the mysteries of 
being, and have placed ourselves in advance of the 
philosophy of our times. The only advance which 
the human reason is likely ever to make on this ground 
will consist in the final removal or dissipation of imag- 
inary mysteries, and the putting out of fashion all at- 
tempted mystifications. Whoever shall do this effect- 
ively will have rendered a good service to abstract 
philosophy. 

43. The words three, five, eight, twelve, have no 
meaning if they are taken purely and singly, and are 
held apart from all other words or ideas. But they 



METAPHYSICS : ULTIMATE ABSTEACTIONS. 29 

may acquire a meaning in two ways — either Tby link- 
ing themselves to substantives, such as the words 
dice, pence, planets : three dice, five pence, eight plan- 
ets, twelve men ; or otherwise Tby excluding all men- 
tal recollection of things actual, while we use the words 
as expressive of certain relations that subsist in and 
among these quantities, as thus : 3 + 5 = 8; or 8 x 12 
= 96. These words, or the figures employed for con- 
venience to represent them, when they have thus been 
packed together, acquire a significance which they did 
not possess before ; and on the ground of these ac- 
quired meanings we may go on reasoning without end, 
and with the most absolute security, although, from 
the beginning to the end of the longest calculation, 
they never pass from their purely abstract condition. 
The reasoning faculty would gain no aid, but, on the 
contrary, would encumber itself by endeavoring to 
keep hold of some concrete conception, as, for instance, 
by thinking of dice, or pence, or any thing else at 
each step. 

44. But in entering upon the region of metaphysical 
abstractions we do not find it so easy to hold these 
notions in their purely abstract condition, and there- 
fore we are apt to seek the aid of frequent exemplifi- 
cations or instances. It is only as the result of much 
discipline and practice that we can follow them, and 
can trace their relation one to another with any such 
ease as that which attaches to arithmetical or geomet- 
rical reasoning. At the end of a book of arithmetic 
various examples are placed before the learner for his 
exercise in applying the rules which he is supposed 
already to understand, and for showing him how these 



30 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

rules may be made available for the purposes of com- 
mon life. But in metaphysical treatises examples are 
appealed to almost at every step for the purpose of 
assisting the mind in its efforts to retain its hold of 
abstract notions. We cross and recross the line from 
the abstract to the concrete continually, lest we should 
lose our path. 

45. It is necessary to keep in view this difference 
in method between mathematical and metaphysical 
science. This difference does not go to prove that the 
one class of abstractions is more abstract than the 
other, but only that they are less easily kept apart, 
and less easily dealt with one toward the other. If 
mystery seems to attach to the one class rather than 
to the other, it is such only as springs up in each 
mind from its own confusions, from its inaptitude, or 
its want of discipline, or perhaps from a futile attempt 
to go beyond the limit which, on all subjects alike, 
mathematical, physical, and metaphysical, circum- 
scribes the human faculties. 

46. After I have ascertained the relation of the hy- 
pothenuse of a right-angled triangle to its two sides, 
if I go on to ask, But what is this " extension" which 
I have assumed to be reality, and which sustains this 
process of reasoning?- — if I do this, I lose myself 
upon an endless path, or, rather, I tread a circle which 
brings me round, ever and again, to my starting-point. 
In like manner it is that we come to a limit (as above 
stated) in treating of metaphysical abstractions. Let 
us only be aware of the fact, and keep to our line ac- 
cordingly. 

47. The most frequent and the most familiar of the 



metaphysics: ultimate abstractions. 31 

processes of abstraction is that which takes place 
when, in looking at or in thinking of an object of any 
kind, we mentally put one of its properties or qualities 
in the place of another of the same order. Thus, if a 
solid sphere be in view, or if I am thinking of such 
an object and if its color is blue, I find it easy to 
imagine it to be of any other color — it might be red 
or yellow. These colors, therefore, are in idea separ- 
able from the object before me. I can think of them 
apart from it ; I can take them up in turn, and can 
attach them to or can detach them from the surface 
of the mass. But at the moment when I attempt any 
such disjoining of qualities, I find the need of a term 
— a name, without the aid of which this shifting of 
my own conceptions would be difficult. This need of 
language in dealing with abstractions becomes more 
urgent in proportion as the sensible qualities of any 
objects are more specific and peculiar. Thus, even if 
I might perhaps dispense with the words red, yelloio, 
blue, in thinking of those colors generally, or as they 
are seen in the optical spectrum, I can not do so when 
I am thinking of such specific tints of color as distin- 
guish iron, silver, zinc, tin, lead, and a thousand others. 
I must name something which is permanently of that 
precise color, and this name fixes itself in my recol- 
lection by its recalling other sensible properties with 
which it is always in fact associated : thus the color 
of zinc, as distinguished from the color of tin, keeps 
itself distinct in my thoughts by help of its combina- 
tion .with the weight, the feel, the hardness, and the 
taste and smell of the two metals ; the compound term, 
color of zinc, serves to bind together several qualities, 



32 - THE WORLD OF MIND. 

affecting the senses of sight and touch, and which, 
when thus made up and ticketed, may be distinctly 
recollected and discoursed about. 

48. But it is for quite a different reason that we 
have need of the aid of language, and, in truth, are ab- 
solutely dependent upon its aid when we advance from 
the simpler kinds of abstraction toward those which 
are more remote. As to some of these, as we shall 
see, it would not be possible, even for a practiced mind, 
to keep its hold of them, unless by the help of a word 
which has come to attach itself to the notion we are 
laboring to render distinct and permanent. Let us see 
in what way we arrive at notions of this more precari- 
ous or evanescent kind. 

49. We go back, then, to the easiest sort of abstrac- 
tions — those, namely, which result from the separation 
of one quality in any object from the other qualities by 
which it makes itself known to us through the senses 
of sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing, or through 
any two or more of these senses combined. 

50. A sphere is before me which I touch, and find 
it to be solid and hard : its color is a gray blue — the 
color of iron. When struck, it gives a sharp metallic 
sound. If I apply the tongue to it, it affects the taste 
in a peculiar manner. Let me retain the idea of the 
solid sphere, but suppose it to show a bright vermil- 
ion ; and instead of the hardness of iron, I impute to it 
the hardness of lead ; and instead of its deep sharp 
sound when struck, it gives the sound of a wooden 
ball ; and instead of a chalybeate taste, it has the taste 
of sugar. 

51. All these substitutions of sensible qualities, one 



metaphysics: ultimate abstractions. 33 

for another of the same order, and of such a kind as 
might be true in fact, are easily made ; and it is also 
easy, in imagination, to make mental substitutions of 
the most incongruous kinds. Thus, although I have 
never seen a green horse, yet I can fancy such a one. 
I have never had in hand a piece of charcoal that would 
take impressions like wax, but the idea is conceivable. 
It is thus that we can go on, without end, in readjust- 
ing, or in assorting in some new manner, the various 
impressions that are made upon the senses by external 
objects. It is this facility of readjustment which is 
the germ of the mechanic arts, as well as of those 
higher products of the human mind which are realized 
in poetry and the fine arts. 

52. From this easily -understood process of substi- 
tution we advance a step toward what is more purely 
abstract when we remove from our idea or conception 
of any object one entire set of its sensible properties. 
Thus we have supposed the sphere to have a metallic 
taste and smell ; but we now think of it as devoid of 
those properties : in this respect it is as a globe of 
glass. We have supposed it to be sonorous ; but now 
it returns no sound when struck. We have seen it to 
be of a bright color ; but we imagine it to be colorless 
— it is translucent, and it is so placed as to show nei- 
ther reflection of light nor refraction ; but it retains 
its solidity and its spherical form. 

53. We next suppose the sphere to pass into a 
spheroidal figure — prolate or oblate ; or it assumes 
any other form, whether regular or irregular. But if, 
beyond all these subtractions of sensible qualities or 
these substitutions, we go on to imagine this same 

B 2 



34 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

solid mass to be entirely divested of form or definite 
shape — if we endeavor to think of it as having no con- 
tour or outline, our ideas become confused, and we are 
warned that the abstractive faculty has come near to 
its limit in this direction. Nevertheless, we retain our 
hold of the vague notion that remains by help of the 
phrase solid extension, or of some other term of simi- 
lar import, which stands as the symbol of something 
which we believe to be real, although it has gone be- 
yond the range of the conceptive faculty. 

54. Let us, then, retrace our steps so far as this : 
we call back the conception of figure, and we keep in 
view, as before, a solid sphere — tangible, if not visible. 
I embrace this mass between the right hand and the 
left hand, and find it resists my efforts to join hands : 
it is where it will not allow me to be at the same 
time. Yet it may become soft, or fluid, or gaseous ; 
nevertheless, and although now it has yielded to my 
hands, I still believe it to be, as it was before, an oc- 
cupant of space, and, as an elastic gas, it may fill a 
space many thousand times larger than it did as a 
solid or as a fluid. 

55. But now, although we should hesitate to affirm 
that extension is a property which is common to Mind 
and to Matter, nevertheless the Mind, as seated in the 
animal organization, and when it exerts its force 
through the medium of the nervous threads and the 
muscular system, becomes conscious of extension, and 
of solidity, and of the vis inertice of matter. What 
may. be implied in this consciousness as to the corre- 
spondence between Mind and Matter, this is not the 
place to inquire, for such an inquiry belongs to psy- 



METAPHYSICS: ULTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS. 35 

cliology, not to metaphysics. All we have now to do 
with is that process in the course of which we arrive 
at these notions of extension and solidity as properties 
of matter, and also of that force, as related to the ex- 
ternal world, which is the inherent property and the 
prime element of Mind as distinguished from matter : 
matter does not move matter otherwise than as a me- 
dium, but Mind does move it. 

56. That the objects to which we impute extension 
and solidity are real, and that they are not mere states 
of the Mind itself, is a belief or an intuitive persuasion 
which returns upon us irresistibly if for a moment we 
have labored to persuade ourselves to the contrary. 
This belief combines in itself the concurrent evidence 
of two or more of the senses — sight, touch, and perhaps 
hearing, and taste or smell. 

57. But, moreover, that those bodies which excite 
in me this belief do indeed exist independently of me, 
I have this further evidence, that although the vis in- 
ertim which belongs to them may, within certain lim- 
its, give way to Mind-force, so that they are displaced 
by it, they do not obey my mere volitions, or yield 
themselves to my control in any manner analogous to 
that in which the states of the Mind itself are under 
control. The difference is so clearly marked, and is so 
great as to bear clown and to crush any sort of sophis- 
try by which it might be attempted to blend the two 
experiences into one. Over the states of the Mind it- 
self, if the Mind be in a healthy condition, and if it be 
disciplined also, it exercises an almost unlimited con- 
trol ; within its own home the Mind is absolute, or 
nearly so ; but as to the outer world, and the modes 



36 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

in which the outer world affects the Mind through the 
senses, matter is absolute ; Mind is passive and sub- 
missive. 

58. Solid extension, let us say that of the sphere, 
may be conceived of as spreading itself out further 
and further, until it fills a planetary orbit, or until it 
embraces the starry universe ; and it may go even be- 
yond this limit ; or the line which we have supposed 
to produce itself from point to point may go on moving- 
forward in the same direction without end and forever. 
At any one stage of its progress, what should forbid 
its advancing one other stage ; and then, why may it 
not do the like again? This supposition of an endless 
progress, or movement onward, though we fail to fol- 
low it conceptively, compacts itself into an abstract 
notion for which we require a name, and we call it 
The Infinite, or Infinitude. 

59. But an event of another kind may be imagined 
as possible. In truth, it is an event which obtrudes 
itself upon our thoughts, and which, when once it has 
occurred, we find it impossible to dismiss entirely. 
The solid sphere which just now I had before me, and 
which I felt and saw, may not only disappear, or cease 
to be felt and seen, but it may have ceased to be. We 
may imagine this, at least : not that it has flown off, 
and so might be overtaken somewhere, but we may 
suppose that it is not. "What is there, then, where it 
was, but where now it is not ? The answer may be, 
Nothing ; for I may imagine the atmosphere and every 
gas removed from where it was. But the word noth- 
ing, if it be taken in its simple sense, does not quite 
satisfy the mind. The annihilated sphere has left a 



METAPHYSICS: ULTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS. 37 

sort of residual meaning in its place, or a shadow of 
reality which asks a name. This remainder of mean- 
ing is symbolized or represented by the word Space, 
and when we have accepted it we feel as if an intel- 
lectual necessity had been supplied. 

60. To the bare notion which the word space en- 
ables us to retain some sort of hold of, we render back 
a portion of the properties of solid extension, and on 
this foundation build the most certain of the sciences. 
Thus we allow ourselves to think (or to speak, if not 
to think) of space as divisible into parts, and as sus- 
ceptible of measurement, and also as capable of end- 
less progression outward from a centre. In this way 
we come to speak of Infinite Space. Here, then, is 
an abstract notion from which I have removed all sen- 
sible properties — nay, all properties, whether sensible 
or only conceivable, and yet I am not content to call 
it nothing ; nor can I rid myself of it : it is like to 
nothing ; it clings to my consciousness ; it is, or it 
has become to me, a law of my intellectual existence. 
I can not think of myself or of any other existence 
otherwise than as occupying space. 

61. Beyond this limit and in this direction no hu- 
man mind has hitherto made any progress, or has 
shown us how we may analyze the notion represented 
by the word space. The analytic faculty has at length 
fully done its office, and the result is an ultimate ab- 
straction. 

62. As often as any such process of thought brings 
us into the presence of a notion beyond which we 
make no advance, we look about for a word that shall 
mark the terminus, or, as we might say, that shall 



d»- THE "WORLD OF MIND. 

keep possession of something which we have acquired 
with labor, and which yet we find it equally difficult 
to retain or to dismiss. After some severe mental 
process has driven off, one by one, every conceivable 
property which we may imagine to be removable from 
the object, we then consign the vague residue, or what 
we might call the ashes of thought, to the custody of 
an abstract term, such as the one we have just now 
mentioned. 

63. Another of these ultimate abstractions which 
so enters into our consciousness as to become an in- 
separable element of it, is that of Duration, or, as 
measured into equal parts, Time. In a manner anal- 
ogous to that which gives us the idea of extension — 
length and breadth — we derive from our consciousness 
of continuous being the notion of duration, or time. 
From this notion we do not find it possible to set our- 
selves free. We can not think of existence at all as a 
single point that has no continuance. 

64. Although duration must be made up of a suc- 
cession of instants, even as a line is constituted of 
points, no one of which has any magnitude, yet our 
consciousness always embraces more of it than any 
such single instant, and it is only by an effort that 
we force ourselves to distinguish the instant actually 
present from the instants that are just past. Time is 
to us a flux, of which we take possession of a greater 
or of a less breadth ; it is as if the now of our exist- 
ence stretched itself over an appreciable area. The 
estimate we form of the length of any marked period 
of time depends partly upon the state of the mind it- 
self, but mainly upon a habit which spontaneously 



metaphysics: ultimate abstractions. 39 

arises from the references we make to the mechanical 
and the astronomical measurements of time. If it 
were not for the clock, and for the alternations of day 
and night, our estimates of the passage of time would 
be liable to very great variations. But these facts be- 
long rather to the physiology of the Mind than to our 
immediate subject. 

65. An absolute separation of the physical from the 
metaphysical is not easily effected or adhered to on 
this ground, for many feelings and habits which will 
hereafter claim to be considered mix themselves with 
the merely abstract notion of which we are in quest. 
For the purpose, therefore, of keeping clear of these 
mixed conceptions as far as possible, we return to the 
illustration above adduced — a solid sphere, which we 
may imagine to be before us, is suspended in space. 
It is unchanged ; it is unchangeable as to its proper- 
ties and conditions ; but while we have been looking 
at or thinking of it, we have ourselves passed through 
a history — we have existed through a line or flow of 
existences, of which, singly, some account might be 
rendered. This period is not one existence, but it is 
a series, and it must be so, as well to this sphere as to 
ourselves : the one, as well as the other, combines two 
elements — the instant now present, and the existences 
past, that have ceased to be instant. In our minds 
the two elements melt into each other, and form an 
idea or conception of continuance in being, and we are 
intellectually compelled to attribute duration to the 
unconscious sphere not less than to ourselves. 

66. This same conception attaches itself, in our 
minds, to all other existences, even to those to which 



40 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

we impute neither change nor consciousness. As the 
fluxion of a point gives us the notion of linear exten- 
sion, so the fluxion of an instant gives us the notion 
of duration ; and the persistence which belongs to 
thought enables us to retain our hold of large portions 
of this ever-flowing existence. 

67. We fail to exclude from our idea of this solid 
sphere — although it has undergone no change what- 
ever — the idea of a history, albeit it is a history with- 
out events : it has continued to be, and it has run par- 
allel with our own being through time. We arrive, 
therefore, at the abstract notion of duration, taken 
apart from all idea of change or evolution, or of pas- 
sage from one condition to another. 

68. As extension may run out toward the infinite, 
so existence, as related to time, may run out toward 
the infinite ; and then we have before us the incon- 
ceivable notion of duration, without beginning and 
without end. 

69. Our consciousness of extension as divisible into 
parts, and our consciousness of a flux of being consti- 
tuting a history, give us aid in keeping possession of 
the abstract notions of space and time ; but we may 
at least conceive of the extinction of all beings, mate- 
rial and intellectual. There would nevertheless re- 
main — what we can not imagine otherwise than that 
they should remain — namely, space without bounds, 
and duration without bounds. The sphere, in ceasing 
to exist, does not release us from the notion of space, 
nor, in ceasing to exist, does it release us from the no- 
tion of duration ; but when the human mind has come 
to touch this border, it must be content to retrace its 



metaphysics: ultimate absteactions. 41 

steps toward the concrete : whatever there may be out- 
stretched beyond this limit, it is what can never be- 
come an intelligible object of inquiry. The faculty of 
abstraction, as developed in the human mind, has ex- 
hausted itself in this direction. 

70. And yet as far as this we must go by a sort 
of necessity. The fact that the language of every cul- 
tured people possesses terms representative of these 
ultimate abstractions, is proof conclusive that the hu- 
man mind is so constituted as that it must go on to 
this extent, and so conceive of the infinite as apart 
from actual existence — a succession which has no 
changes ; a track which leaves no trace ; a line which 
has no breadth and no angles, which intersects noth- 
ing, which is parallel to nothing, which arises nowhere, 
and which ends nowhere and never. 

71. "Why it is that I can not disengage my thoughts 
from these two spectres — infinite space and infinite 
duration, void space and unchanging duration ; why 
I can not release myself from ideas which at once re- 
fuse to depart, and yet mock my endeavors to grasp 
them, is a question the answer to which, so far as it 
admits of an answer, must be sought for in looking to 
the structure of the human mind, considered physically, 
or as to the elements and laws of its constitution. At 
this stage it is enough to know that we have touched 
the limit of those abstractions which come within the 
range of our faculties. 

72. There is, however, yet an intellectual necessity 
to be supplied ; a word or two is still needed, to which 
we may hand over a residue of meaning, after all dis- 
tinct meaning has been discharged from our mode of 



42 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

conceiving of things in the concrete. We have spoken 
of the material world and of the immaterial as existing 
or as ceasing to exist. This or that object is or it is 
not in being. While it exists, and after we have re- 
moved from our idea of it, one by one, all the properties 
by which it has become cognizable to the senses, we 
still suppose its continuance in space and time. The 
words being and existence offer themselves as represent- 
atives of this denuded conception, and we seem to 
strengthen their import a little by means of the word 
substance, which, as its etymology indicates, represents 
the unknown support of all qualities and properties. 
We have need of the belief that the sensible properties 
of things are set upon something beyond or something- 
deeper than themselves, and which is absolutely occult. 

73. This same necessity attaches to our conscious- 
ness of our own existence. In place of the sensations 
which just now connect me with the objects of the ex- 
ternal Avorld, I may imagine other objects, other places, 
and other things, or I may cease to attend to these 
sensations, and, withdrawing myself to the ideal world, 
may imagine other scenes, and from these may derive 
the means of states of feeling of any sort. 

74. Throughout the course of any such substitu- 
tions or stuffings of scenes, whether voluntary or oth- 
erwise, I retain a persuasion of my own individual 
continuous existence apart from and independent of 
any changes arising either from within or from with- 
out. I AM, whether I think and feel in this manner 
or in any other, or not at all. 

75. The idea of existence has so much tenacity that 
it holds itself entire, even if, as we now suppose, every 



METAPHYSICS : ULTIMATE ABSTRACTIONS. 43 

sensation and feeling lias subsided or vanished. I be- 
lieve that I might pass through a moment, an hour, or 
any other period, in utter unconsciousness, and yet 
should continue to be ; and in a moment after such a 
period, might wake up to the varied experiences of 
common life. 

76. The question is not now whether the human 
mind does ever, in fact, collapse into any such condi- 
tion of unconsciousness, or whether it might remain 
in such a state a day, or a century, or for ages. Ques- 
tions of this kind are physical, not metaphysical. But, 
whether the fact be so or not, it is certain that the ab- 
stractive faculty goes on until we look for a word which 
may save us from a feeling as if the powers of thought 
were stagnating. We speak, then, of bei?ig, or of ex- 
istence, and of substance, material or immaterial. These 
words represent nothing that can be analyzed, for the 
notions they convey (if any) have no constituents ; we 
have already discharged from them all constituent 
ideas, and therefore they can yield no results as ob- 
jects of speculation. 

77. It is not here either affirmed or denied that there 
is a depth in the nature of things which these abstract 
terms conceal from our view. We say only this, that 
they mark the boundary of abstraction, so far as the 
human mind is concerned. Nevertheless, there will 
always be a tendency to push forward a little farther. 
Minds that are more fertile than analytic, more viva- 
cious than exact, and that are ambitious too, and smit- 
ten with the charms of the inscrutable, will be ever 
and again working at these insolubles ; and which, 
when they have packed customary abstract phrases in 



44 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

some new fashion, will exult in the persuasion that 
they have at length mastered the mysteries of exist- 
ence, and have come up from the abyss laden with pre- 
cious ore. 



IV. 
METAPHYSICS: 

MIXED ABSTRACTIONS. 

78. It is important to keep in view a distinction, 
often lost sight of, between what may be unknown in 
fact to ourselves individually, and because we have had 
no means at present of gaining access to the knowledge 
of it, and what is unknown because it transcends the 
range and limits of the human mind. For example, 
the contents of a sealed letter which I hold in my 
hand, or of a casket of which I have not the key, are 
unknown, and so is the condition of the planets as in- 
habited or not : these are things which perhaps I shall 
never be informed of, but I might know them if I had 
access to the facts. But what may be the inner con- 
stitution of the material and immaterial worlds I do 
not know, and I may well suppose that this mystery 
will ever remain beyond the reach of human science. 
It is certain, also, that much which, on grounds of the 
surest reasoning, we hold to be true in theology, can 
be apprehended no otherwise than indistinctly by the 
human mind ; thus the perfections of the Infinite Be- 
ing are assumed as certain in our meditations, although 
we soon feel that here the powers of reason are baffled. 

79. The class of abstractions of which now we have 



metaphysics: mixed abstractions. 45 

to speak are called Mixed Abstractions, for this rea- 
son, that there is blended in them something of what 
the mind has a perfect control over, and therefore 
knowledge of (although individually we may not have 
come to know it), along with something in nature 
which is indeed inaccessible by any method which 
human science has at its command. From this inter- 
mingling of the known and the unknowable much con- 
fusion has arisen, and some controversies also, which 
appear to be inexhaustible, hence take their rise. There 
is a set of abstract terms the mere hearing of which 
excites the idea of interminable and fruitless debate : 
such are the words causation, liberty, necessity, free 
will, and some others, which usually accompany them. 

80. In entering upon this much-debated ground, 
we shall secure for ourselves some ease of mind by 
the simple means of keeping an eye upon the distinc- 
tion above referred to. The popular notion is, that 
metaphysical principles are abstruse and incomprehen- 
sible, while whatever relates to the actual nature of 
those things with which we are familiar must be easi- 
ly comprehensible. A little attention will convince us 
that the very contrary of this is more near the truth. 

81. Pure abstractions, such as those which we have 
now lately had to do with, may not hitherto have en- 
gaged our attention, and therefore it may happen that, 
when we hear the terms in which they are conveyed, 
we may fail to connect with them any clear ideas. In 
the same way we might open a treatise upon the Conic 
Sections, and understand nothing more of it than we 
should in looking into a Chinese tract ; yet it is cer- 
tain that, if we gave time and attention sufficient to 



46 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

this mathematical treatise, we should come, in the full- 
est manner, to a knowledge of its meaning. A math- 
ematical theorem is the product of the human mind — 
nothing more, and it must therefore he comprehensible 
by any human mind possessing ordinary intelligence. 
The same also may be affirmed of whatever is purely 
metaphysical, for this also is a product of -thought — 
simply so, and therefore it can contain nothing that is 
incomprehensible by minds that are sufficiently disci- 
plined in subjects of this class. The human mind may 
imagine mysteries among its own products, but it can 
not make them. 

82. And thus it is that the terms we have now to 
do with, so far as they are purely metaphysical or ab- 
stract, are wholly free from intrinsic difficulty ; but 
then, as some of them — in truth, the leading terms in 
the set — touch upon the structure and the working of 
Mind as it is distinguished from the animal organiza- 
tion, they therefore involve more than is known, or than 
will ever (it is probable) be opened up by scientific in- 
vestigation. What we have now to do is nothing 
more than this — to disengage the metaphysical from 
the physical on this ground. We are not about to 
expound the enigmas of the Universe, but only to ad- 
just and to put in order our own thoughts, and to 
place our terms in their true relative position each to- 
ward the others. 

83. Correlative terms are such as draw their mean- 
ing entirely from their reciprocity, or their bearing- 
one upon the others. Correlative terms present them- 
selves, therefore, in pairs or in sets. Such are the 
words whole and part, a half, a third part ; and such 



METAPHYSICS; MIXED ABSTRACTIONS. 47 

are those many words and phrases which express our 
social relationships. The abstract words and phrases 
which are now in view are all of them correlatives : 
singly taken, they represent nothing ; when packed 
together, they symbolize some fact or some congeries 
of facts, which we are to look for as belonging to the 
physical structure of the world of mind. 

84. This set of terms includes the words power, 
causation (or cause and effect), liberty, necessity, inva- 
riable sequence, freedom of the will, and others of 
nearly the same import. If we would do away with 
some two or three of these words, or would declare 
that no distinguishable meaning attaches to them, we 
ought, in consequence, to reject the others also, or 
those which are their correlatives : if, for instance, we 
say that the words power and cause have no proper 
meaning in a scientific sense, then the balancing word, 
necessity, has also lost its value. And yet when, in 
this way, we have neutralized or have abrogated the 
two phrases, in the next moment we become conscious 
of our need of them. We have thrown away a part 
of our intellectual apparatus — our tools — and we must, 
by any means, recover the use of them. In such cases, 
what may be called the instincts of reason prevail over 
the specious sophistries ot an hour, and we return with 
comfort to modes of thinking and speaking which suit 
us well, just because they are in harmony with the 
Mind itself, and because they have sprung out of itself 
spontaneously. 

85. Let it now be supposed that we have been 
acquainting ourselves with the "mechanism of the 
heavens" — that is to say, the laws of the planetary 



48 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

motions as they are taught by the modern astronomy 
— and that we have traced to their source, in the law 
of gravitation, all those perturbations which, at a first 
view, might seem to be lawless or fortuitous. In con- 
templating this vast and perfect scheme of balanced 
forces, amid the complications of which no real irreg- 
ularity ever occurs — and while we are thinking of such 
a system, and are thinking of nothing beyond or be- 
side it — we should not feel the need of any term where- 
by to affirm the unfailing constancy of the system, in 
contradiction to some imagined inconstancy or irreg- 
ularity. There would be no room for the word neces- 
sity as applicable to these celestial motions, for we 
know w T ell that there neither is nor can be any play 
of chance or fortuity among them. 

86. But instead of the heavens, let me suppose that 
I am looking down into an inclosed garden at the time 
of the fall of the leaf: a huffing wind, thrown into 
gusty eddies by the adjoining buildings and the ave- 
nues of the place, hurls the falling leaves, as they are 
torn from their sprays, hither and thither in endless 
varieties of course. The popular apprehension of such 
a scene of confusion would be that Chance, and not 
Law, is mistress in this inclosure. But science will 
revise any such supposition, and will show me that 
the flitting track of each leaf, from the point of its de- 
tachment to the spot where at length it reaches its 
rest, is as truly and as constantly determined by law 
as are the movements of planets and satellites in their 
orbits. The difference is this : that in the one case 
the influences are such as we can ascertain and pre- 
dict; in the other case they are too many, and they 



METAPHYSICS: MIXED ABSTEACTIONS. 49 

are too intricately intermingled to become calculable ; 
and we should certainly fail in the attempt to predict 
them, even in a single instance. Nevertheless, we can 
not doubt that the course of each leaf might be infal- 
libly foreseen by an intelligence of a higher order than 
the human. An earth-made almanac foreshows, to 
an instant of any time future, what will then be the 
configuration of the planetary system, but a heaven- 
made almanac might place before us the future wintry 
bed of every leaf which is bursting the bud in May. 

87. Let us now shift the scene. Instead of the 
unfailing movements of planets and satellites, and in- 
stead of the apparently fortuitous whirling of autumnal 
leaves — which we find is not indeed fortuitous, but is 
always in accordance with fixed laws — instead of these 
phenomena, we watch the fitful movements of a swarm 
of gnats disporting themselves in the summer's sun 
over a tranquil pond. We have here in view, unques- 
tionably, a new element of motion ; for the leaf, hurried 
before the blast, obeys impulses that affect it from 
without : it gives no indication of a force operating 

from within itself. 

88. But the insect, although yielding itself more or 
less to the breeze, yet, in the main, describes a series 
of curves which obey a law derived from another source, 
namely, the volitions of the animal mind. These vo- 
litions, variable as they are, and taking their rise from 
the centre of this microscopic organization, defy our 
endeavors to predict them from one moment to the 
next. In watching these incalculable gyrations, we 
seem to catch a glimpse of a distinction between irre- 
sistible and invariable law, and a species of movement 

c 



50 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

which declares itself to "be exempt from any such des- 
potism : it is free. There comes before us, then, in 
looking at the animated world, the meaning of the cor- 
relative terms liberty and necessity, or any other terms 
which may be equivalent to these. 

89. It is not until we give attention to this new 
class of phenomena that we find our need of abstract 
terms such as these. We should not think of apply- 
ing to the celestial motions words expressive of their 
unalterable constancy if we had not already contem- 
plated movements which seem, at least, to be free, to 
be inconstant, to be fortuitous. 

90. But now, just as, in the instance of the flitting 
autumnal leaves, we found that we must reject our first 
supposition, that these frail bodies are driven hither 
and thither lawlessly, or as if by mere chance, must 
we not, in like manner, abandon the supposition which, 
at the moment, suggests itself in observing the sportive 
dance of the insect swarm ? It may well be asked, Is 
there any solid ground for the distinction we have sup- 
posed to exist between the one class of phenomena and 
the other ? Are not both alike ruled by law ? Is the 
one kind of motion, in truth, any more free than the 
other ? 

91. We have already allowed this distinction to be 
real, so far as this, that the leaf is driven about by 
forces acting upon it from without, while the insect is 
carried to and fro by forces arising from within. Yet, 
is not this inner impulse itself as much necessitated as 
are the outer forces of the wind and of gravitation ? 
Is, then, the distinction to be accounted real in a 
strictly philosophic sense ? 



metaphysics: mixed absteactions. 51 

92. In endeavoring to meet this question by look- 
ing more carefully into the structure and functions of 
animal organization, our first impression is likely to 
be that the distinction assumed is unreal, and the re- 
sult of such an inquiry will be similar to that which 
led us to recognize the presence of law in the fitful 
course of the detached leaf not less than in the revolu- 
tions of the planets. We may not actually or certainly 
comprehend the purport and intention of the hither and 
thither movements of the insect, but nevertheless we 
believe that he knows what he is about. At the im- 
pulse of instincts which he obeys unconsciously and 
invariably, and also under the guidance of that knowl- 
edge of the outer world which he receives by the organs 
of sight, hearing, smell, and perhaps other senses with 
which man is not furnished, the animal goes, flies, 
crawls, runs, floats, and darts like ligthning, to the 
right or left, in obedience to those combined impulses 
of instinct and of sensation : these are laws as certain 
as gravitation, though they are far more various and 
complicated. 

93. At this point, then, we might stop, and we may 
think our generalization is sufficient if it be not alto- 
gether complete. There will, however, remain a feel- 
ing of dissatisfaction in assenting to the conclusion 
that the distinction between the one order of physical 
agencies and the other is illusory. Here, again, the 
intuitions of reason make a protest against this sort 
of wholesale philosophy, and if we yield to it, it is still 
with a reserved dissent. 

94. The grounds of such an intellectual revulsion 
are of this kind : animal instincts manifestly have in 



52 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

view the animal well-being, the conservation of life ; 
and they combine themselves every moment with im- 
pressions received through the organs of sense ; and, 
as thus combined, they bring about a certain result, 
which is seen in the movements of the animal. In- 
stincts from within and impressions from without are 
centripetal forces : they act in a radial direction, and 
meet in that organ — that centre of the nervous system 
whence volitions take their rise, and where conscious- 
ness is, or seems to be, seated. 

95. Instincts and sensations are subservient to a 
definite purpose, or they are means which come to their 
end in some higher or more comprehensive intention. 
The action or movement of the animal which ensues 
reflects, not the instinct merely nor the sensation mere- 
ly, but this final intention, in which both are combined. 
When, therefore, we have included in our generaliza- 
tion all the facts that belong to these two influences, 
instincts and sensations, there still remains something 
further or deeper to seek for — there remains this Mind- 
FORCE, of which the single volitions are the expression. 

96. Any further question concerning this central 
power, which is the ultimate fact in the animal struc- 
ture, must be carried forward on the ground of a pure- 
ly physical inquiry, and it will come to be considered 
further on in our course. What we have now to do 
is to trace to their origin our own abstract notions, and 
to bring the terms which convey these notions into 
their true relative position. Whether it be so or not, 
when we go down into the depths of animal life, that 
the distinction between liberty and necessity is real, 
and whether or not all physical agencies are, in the 



metaphysics: mixed abstractions. 53 

same sense, the product of irresistible forces — the re- 
sults of laws that are uniform and invariable, yet it is 
certain that the human mind, unless in any instance 
its intuitions are sophisticated, challenges the distinc- 
tion as real. Among those convictions which no soph- 
istry can weaken longer than for an hour, this, of the 
absoluteness of that power of which our volitions are 
the result, is one of the most firm. The most subtile 
processes of logic still leave us in possession of the in- 
tuitive belief that Mind is free, in some sense, in which 
nothing else in the world is free ; and that, whatever 
be the law of its action, it is a law differing essential- 
ly from physical law. 

-97. We go back, then, at present, to the set of cor- 
relative phrases which we have named above. All we 
have to do 'is to assign them to their positions respect- 
ively one toward the others. Which of this set of 
terms is entitled to the foremost place ? The answer 
must be, that one term from which the others mani- 
festly draw their value. 

98. The English language offers to our use no word, 
appropriated to science, which should take this first 
place. We must use the word Powee, because we 
have not a better to indicate that primary element of 
our consciousness around which its other constituents 
take subordinate places. The word causation can 
have no meaning until we have allowed its full mean- 
ing to the word Powee, as the property peculiar to 
mind, and its true characteristic. We then bisect the 
abstract term causation, and so speak of cause and ef- 
fect. The consciousness of power involves, or it in- 
cludes, the notion of freedom or liberty as the condi- 



54 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

tion of power. Power that is overpowered is not pow- 
er. Power that is controlled in part is an admissible 
notion, and therefore it is that the word freedom, as 
applied to the human mind, is a term that has a vari- 
able value. Human minds are more or less free at 
different times or in different conditions. One mind 
has incomparably more freedom than some other minds ; 
some appear to have none. 

99. This primary element of our consciousness, 
which we are intending when we employ the word 
power, is entitled to the foremost place in this set of 
abstract notions ; first, because the other terms of the 
set depend entirely upon this for their significance ; 
and, secondly, because among them this is the one 
that draws its meaning directly from our conscious- 
ness, and which is able to stand by itself without sup- 
port. 

100. When we shall come to inquire hereafter con- 
cerning the structure of Mind as a subject of physical 
science, we may see reason to assent to this doctrine, 
namely, that Mind is the only power or force in the 
universe of which we have or can have any cognizance. 
In that case we shall be ready to grant that, in the 
scheme of the material world, as to all those "con- 
stant sequences," as they are called, and those invari- 
able linkings of event to event with which physical 
science is concerned, the term causation can be applied 
to them only in a figurative sense or by a metonymy. 
This tendency to impute power or inherent force to 
the immediate antecedent of any event, and so to speak 
of physical causes and effects, is, in fact, a clear indi- 
cation of the prerogative of the Mind itself, conscious 



METAPHYSICS : MIXED ABSTRACTIONS. 55 

as it is of being the initiative power both within itself 
and as it is related to the outer world. 

101. Uncultured nations, and, indeed, the ignorant 
and imaginative every where, are prompt to impute 
Mind, and feeling, and purpose, and power to all things 
material — animate and inanimate, and to suppose that 
a hidden soul is expressing itself in every event, es- 
pecially in such as excite wonder or terror. Philoso- 
phy comes in to check, or to dispel entirely, these im- 
aginary imputations, and to deprive the term causa- 
tion of its meaning otherwise than as significant of the 
fixed sequency of events. Physical science is doing 
this more and more, and it must do so until this proc- 
ess of generalization comes at length to touch or to 
call in question the prerogatives of the world of Mind. 
When this happens, a strong reaction takes place, and 
then a challenge is made on behalf of those intuitive 
convictions which are anterior to formal reasoning, and 
which, therefore, have a hold of the intellect that is 
too strong to be much affected by logic, however spe- 
cious it may be. 

102. In recent times strenuous endeavors have been 
made to bring into doubt those instinctive convictions 
which are part of the constitution of the human mind, 
and which are the foundation of all knowledge, ordi- 
nary or scientific. 

103. On the one hand, to reject these primary con- 
victions because they can not be made good by rea- 
soning, or, on the other hand, to attempt to establish 
them as theorems that are capable of demonstration, is 
to misapprehend the constitution of the mind. What 
can be done by means of that sort of analysis and rea- 



56 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

soning which is called metaphysical, is simply this — 
to exhibit the relative position of those abstract notions 
which are the product of thought. The absolute value 
of the terms appropriated to those notions is not 'to be 
found, for elements are not to be analyzed. 

104. It does not come, therefore, within the prov- 
ince of metaphysics to add any thing, even a particle, 
to our knowledge of the world of Mind. It has done 
its utmost when it has set its own house in order. If 
any genuine advances are possible on this field, they 
must be looked for on the path of physical inquiry. 



V. 
METAPHYSICS : 

CONCEETTVE AE-STEACTIONS. 

105. In the exercise of this same faculty of ab- 
straction we may either, as in the various instances al- 
ready mentioned, employ ourselves in setting off from 
some complex notion, one by one, its several constitu- 
ents, until we arrive at that which admits of no fur- 
ther separation, or, otherwise, we may take up an ab- 
stract idea or a principle, whether it be of the simplest 
order or not, and then look about for the same idea or 
principle as it is to be met with elsewhere, imbodied 
under very different conditions, and combined with 
other elements. 

106. Instances of this kind meet us at every step 
throughout the circle of the physical sciences ; in 
truth, such instances constitute the staple of these sci- 
ences, and they are so abundant that they need not be 



metaphysics: conceetive absteactions. 57 

mentioned otherwise than briefly in illustration of 
what we now intend. The " laws of nature," as they 
are called, are, as to our mode of conceiving of them, 
certain abstract notions, which we recognize as we find 
them taking effect in a multitude of diversified in- 
stances. 

107. Newton's falling apple suggested to him a 
"law," which he perceived to take effect in determin- 
ing the revolution of the moon in her orbit, and then 
again to prevail throughout the planetary system. 
When the ascent of water under a vacuum came to be 
truly understood, the rise of mercury in a tube, under 
the same conditions, was seen to be an instance expli- 
cable by means of the same law ; and then the heights 
respectively to which the two fluids will rise in vacuo 
were found to correspond to the specific gravity of the 
two as weighed against the terrestrial atmosphere, 
thus confirming the principle that had been assumed. 
Those innumerable analogies which are found to pre- 
vail between vegetable and animal organizations are 
instances of the same kind ; as, for example, the sev- 
eral processes of nutrition, excretion, respiration, se- 
cretion, are found to be, to a certain extent, identical 
in principle ; that is to say, a law, which, as we appre- 
hend it, is not a reality any where existing, but is a 
pure abstraction, is recognized in this, in that, in many 
instances, which, at the first view of them, differ in 
many respects, and they so differ that it is with an 
emotion, first of surprise and then of pleasure, that we 
catch the identity which has been concealed, as we 
might say, hitherto, within the folds of many exterior 
diversities. 

C2 



58 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

108. Abstractions of this kind may properly be 
called Conceetive, because their tendency is to gath- 
er around themselves other adjuncts than those with 
which, at first, they may have presented themselves 
to our view. The human mind, when once its facul- 
ties have been pleasurably stimulated in this manner, 
eagerly goes in quest of these instances of sameness 
amid differences. The mind is never wearied in the 
pursuit of this ever-fresh intellectual gratification ; this 
appetite of the reason meets no satiety in its indulg- 
ence. 

109. As well in gaining possession of these concre- 
tive abstractions at the first as in pursuing them 
through all diversities of form, it is the same faculty 
that is brought into exercise as in the analytic proc- 
esses which we have already spoken of. But now 
we find ourselves to be moving in a contrary direc- 
tion, and we have also now another end in view. 

110. Nor is this the only difference between the 
two mental exercises ; for the state of mind which is 
produced by the one when it has become a habit of 
thought, is in utter contrast with that state of mind 
which is produced by the other when it also has be- 
come a habit of thought in the individual mind. 

111. In following out, to their last stage, those proc- 
esses which yield what we have called ultimate ab- 
stractions, we are, in a manner, driven forward by a 
stern impulse, which forbids our stopping short any 
where, so long as to advance another step may be pos- 
sible ; and when at length we reach that last posi- 
tion — a position on the very verge of the region that 
is accessible to the human intellect, we retrace our 



metaphysics: concretive abstractions. 59 

steps with little of the feeling of having gathered any 
fruit, or of having in any sense enriched ourselves in- 
tellectually. In place of a pleasurable emotion of this 
kind, there has come upon us a gloom and the discom- 
fort of having looked into an abyss — a dark void, 
where, if we were to plunge into it, a hopeless skepti- 
cism must be our portion. 

112. Wholly of another kind is the feeling with 
which, after we have clearly apprehended some law of 
this concretive kind, we set out in quest of it, as it 
may be hidden beneath all kinds of outward dissimi- 
larities. In this hopeful and fruitful quest we take a 
range through the ancient universe, and meet what we 
are in search of at almost every turn. The feeling is 
that of acquisition, not of loss ; a feeling of confidence, 
not of diffidence ; of sure belief, not of skepticism. 

113. In those departments of science which are ob- 
servational and experimental, we find what we are 
seeking for; in those which are inventive and con- 
structive, we make what we are seeking for. In chem- 
istry, for example, we find the law of definite propor- 
tions in the combination of elements. In mechanics, 
when its principles are apprehended, we create the ap- 
plications of them in such forms as may suit our pur- 
poses. 

114. It is the perception of difference that first 
awakens attention, and which attracts the eye and 
stimulates the mind ; but then it is the perception of 
sameness, or identity, that leads it forward, as if by a 
charm. The two perceptions alternately taking effect, 
constitute the fascination of the philosophic life. This, 
however, is a subject that belongs to our after course. 






60 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

115. The sameness or identity which has present- 
ed itself as an abstract notion tempts us to look for it 
elsewhere among diverse forms, or to give effect to it 
in other modes, and it is thus that it becomes concre- 
tive. 

116. For instance, in making use of a lever for up- 
lifting a heavy mass, I find that I am in command of 
a great advantage — I am using a power, as I am 
tempted to call it, without the aid of which my utmost 
strength would be insufficient to produce the desired 
effect. But whence comes this advantage ? Is there, 
in fact, any power — is there any vitality in this iron 
rod ? This is not to be supposed. I find, or I am 
taught, that the helpful property of the lever results 
simply from this — that by lodging it upon a solid sup- 
port very near to one end, I am able to bring about a 
compromise between space and time. I spread the 
muscular force over a large space as compared with 
that space within which the other end is to take effect. 
Here, then, I have before me, in this compromise, a 
principle which I conceive of abstractedly ; and now, 
putting out of view the lever and the adjustments for 
applying it, I go on to inquire whether the same prin- 
ciple might not be brought into use under, perhaps, 
very different conditions ; and so, in fact, it is, in what 
are called "the mechanical powers." 

117. The lever and the screw are engines which, to 
the eye, are wholly unlike, and so are the wheel and 
axle, and the wedge, and the inclined plane, and the 
pulley, which yet are one as to their reason, though, 
to make them available for mechanical purposes, they 
are different in form and structure. To the unin- 



metaphysics: concretive abstractions. 61 

structed these appliances may seem to derive the pow- 
er which we impute to them from wholly different 
sources. It is only when instructed that we learn to 
trace this supposed power to its one origin in the same 
law of compromise. 

118. The more thoroughly and distinctly we gain 
possession of any such law in the form of an abstract 
notion, the more likely are we to use it concretively ; 
that is to say, to give it expression, and to realize it, 
under some hitherto not-thought-of conditions. This 
abstract conception of the law which takes effect in 
the mechanical powers — the lever, the screw, and the 
others, when it comes to combine itself with the law 
of fluids as to equal pressure in all directions, leads to 
the idea of the Hydraulic Press, which, at the first 
view of it, may appear to derive the enormous force it 
places at our command from some hidden power which 
must be altogether new, and which must differ essen- 
tially from that of the lever and the screw. But we 
find it is not so. The abstract idea prevailing in each 
of these instances tends to bring itself out in these and 
other modes, and thus it becomes concretive. 

119. As we may gain power by extending the space 
through which the first moving force acts — for in- 
stance, in the lever, when it is used as above mention- 
ed — so, to suit other purposes, we may gain speed by 
a sacrifice of power, as in that sort of lever of which 
the oar is an instance ; and such, too, is the human 
arm, and the legs of quadrupeds, and the wings of 
birds, and the fins of fishes ; and such is the paddle- 
wheel of the steam-boat. The principle is one, the 
adjuncts and applications are various. 



62 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

120. But again : Mass and Velocity give Moment- 
um or force, derived from the vis inertice of matter, 
and this force may become prodigiously great. Thus 
it is that a hammer, wielded by a feeble hand, drives 
a nail into an oak board which the strongest arm would 
not be able to push into it. Look at the steam-ham- 
mer ; or see what is done when the point-blank fire of 
heavy guns is effecting a breach in a granite pier. The 
idea of force thus obtainable for mechanical purposes, 
by giving a high speed to a mass of solid matter, be- 
comes the fertile source of almost innumerable con- 
trivances ; and it does so concretively. Might not this 
principle be applied even to a soft substance if a speed 
proportionately great were imparted to it? It is so 
when an inch of candle is fired from a gun, and actu- 
ally passes through a deal board. 

121. A body in falling, that is, when acted upon by 
gravitation, acquires speed, constantly increasing the 
farther it falls ; and thus it gets force — force enough 
to carry it up again near to the level from whence it 
had started ; so that if a little more force be added to 
it from some other power, this addition will suffice for 
carrying it quite up to that first level, and thus the 
fall and the rise may be repeated forever. So it is 
that the bob of a pendulum oscillates, performing the 
same journey through space again and again, only sup- 
posing that, at the point of each return, it receives a 
little additional impulse from the weight or the coiled 
spring, just enough to make up for what it has lost 
from friction and the resistance of the atmosphere. 

122. But we may draw instances of the concretive 
process from a very different field. The conceptions 



METAPHYSICS : CONCEETIVE ABSTRACTIONS. 63 

we entertain of moral qualities are abstractions mere- 
ly ; nevertheless, they are, or they may be, perfectly 
distinct, and they are such, that we easily recognize 
them under all diversities of circumstance in the con- 
duct and behavior of those around us. "What is Gen- 
erosity, or Patriotism, or Self-denial ? what is Ava- 
rice, or Pride, or Cruelty ? As to these distinctions in 
temper, feeling, conduct, action, we need no instruction 
for discriminating them ; we need no carefully-worded 
definitions to prevent our taking one for the other ; we 
need no scientific analysis of their constituents to place 
them in our view free from uncertainty. As often as 
a certain line of conduct or order of temper comes be- 
fore us, a perfectly definite idea is suggested to us, and 
an emotion is excited, which varies very little merely 
in accordance with the particular circumstances that 
may have attended the occurrence in question. 

123. But now, as to these definite moral abstrac- 
tions, how do they come to be concretive ? When one 
such notion — say that of self-denying beneficence — has 
lodged itself in the mind, and has become a centre or 
a nucleus of the moral sentiments in the individual, it 
suggests such courses of conduct as shall imbody it. 
Or let us take an instance which may be less open to 
ambiguity. The author of a fiction — whether it be a 
drama, an epic poem, or a novel — takes to himself, as 
his guiding principle, some one or more of these moral 
abstractions, whether on the side of virtue or of vice, 
and then he invents occasions and imagines circum- 
stances which shall be fit for calling forth this quality 
and for giving a characteristic expression to it. In 
this manner the notion concretes itself; and it does so 



64 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

in all conceivable modes until it lias run itself through 
the history of a life : it makes itself the one reason of 
a man's fortunes or of his misfortunes ; it is the solu- 
tion of every enigma in his behavior amid that current 
of events which have given variety to the story. 

124. But now it is evident that we may either take 
up an abstraction of this class, and then employ our- 
selves in gathering around it its suitable adjuncts, its 
fitting circumstances, and its manifestations, or we 
may place before us some such actual assemblage of 
adjuncts, enveloping or expressing a single abstract 
idea ; and then, looking at the concrete as a whole, we 
may examine and criticise the work, and we may come 
to the conclusion either that all the parts are what and 
where they should be, or else we find fault with the 
artist as one who is unskillful in his line. 

125. Now from this source — from the examination 
of a concrete mass — when all is found to be in har- 
mony, and when the parts cohere perfectly with each 
other, and when every thing is in accordance with the 
ruling idea of the whole, we receive a pleasurable and 
lively impression, and which we speak of as arising 
from the sense of Fitness and Order. 



VI. 
METAPHYSICS: 

THE SENSE OF FITNESS AND ORDER. 

126. This, whether or not in strictness we should 
call it an instinctive feeling, has in fact been regarded 
as an elementary constituent of the human mind. The 



METAPHYSICS : SENSE OF FITNESS AND ORDER. 65 

question whether it be so or not does not belong to 
this stage of our subject. But the sense or feeling 
itself has a direct bearing upon metaphysical specula- 
tions, which we must not fail to take account of, and 
which requires it here to be brought forward. 

127. Great stress, and very justly, has been laid 
upon this instinctive feeling in the momentous argu- 
ment concerning the grounds of Abstract Theology. 
In this place all we need do is to show in what way 
it may serve to restore that equilibrium in the mind 
which is liable to be disturbed in the course of an ex- 
clusive attention to metaphysical abstractions. 

128. We have just now supposed there to be in 
our view some aggregate — some mechanism or some 
organization, in which various adjuncts surround, and 
combine to give effect to, a law — this law being, in 
that case and for that reason, a concretive abstraction. 

129. What we are here in search of is Oneness and 
singleness of intention, and we are to find it as a centre 
toward which the parts converge, so that each adjunct 
is seen to draw its reason from this one governing idea. 

130. In setting out upon such a quest, we must dis- 
tinguish between the fitting of parts one to the others, 
and the fitness of parts in their relation to the whole, 
of which they are the constituents. In the first, these 
parts may be more or fewer, indefinitely ; in the sec- 
ond, no supernumeraries should have any place. 

131. The fragments of a quarry of glass or a china 
plate are before me in a confused heap. By some 
painstaking I succeed in finding the neighbor pieces to 
each of these fragments, and at length I dispose them 
all precisely as they were placed in the unbroken plate. 



66 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

This is only a fitting of parts ; but if the plate at first 
were a perfect circle, or an oval, or a hexagon, then, 
if this geometric figure be taken as the rule, or as the 
law which is to determine the place of all the parts, it 
leads me not merely to take care that edge fits edge 
every where, but that, when at length all the pieces 
have been so fitted, they may make up the figure, the 
circle, or the oval, or the hexagon, in accordance with 
its original contour. If it be so, then all is right; 
and this word right, which I thus instinctively employ, 
means this, that the fragments, whether they be a 
dozen or a hundred, have now become one. Together, 
they realize the abstract idea of the original plate ; 
they are what the maker of it intended. 

132. Let the fragments before me be those of a vase 
decorated with wreaths and figures. The broken and 
scattered pieces must be brought to fit one to another : 
this is the first condition of the process ; but when 
they are so fitted, the contour of the vase must be 
satisfied ; for, perchance the fragments in hand have 
belonged to two vases, differing in outline ; but then 
the aggregate would not constitute a whole / or, per- 
chance, these pieces are parts of two vases of the same 
form and dimensions ; and although, therefore, they 
might be made to fit, yet the decorations upon them 
would not agree — the artist's idea would not be brought 
out. We must, at the last, see before us a oneness in 
all respects, or, if we can not effect it, we must aban- 
don our task as impracticable. 

133. But if, indeed, all be right — if the fittings be 
exact — if the contour be true, and if the painted deco- 
rations be complete, then we contemplate the whole 



METAPHYSICS : SENSE OF FITNESS AND ORDER. 67 

with a feeling so lively that it may be called an emo- 
tion ; it is a vivid consciousness of truth and reality. 
Such is the constitution of the human mind that it 
comes to a rest, with satisfaction, whenever it is able, 
in this manner, to bring dissimilar or disjointed objects 
to accordance and to unity. 

134. In following this sense of fitness through va- 
rious instances, we may see how strong a hold it has 
upon the reason and upon the primary instincts of the 
human mind ; in fact, this hold proves itself to be im- 
movably firm ; and we shall find that it affords an ef- 
fective means of counteracting that tendency to uni- 
versal doubt which belongs to, or which follows in the 
track of purely abstract speculation. 

135. In proportion as the intellectual faculties are 
predominant, and if they be also in a healthy condi- 
tion, the tendency is strong to simplify, and to reduce 
things to classes, and to generalize — all which proc- 
esses, though they differ according to the objects to 
which they relate, are in substance the same : they are 
the several methods by means of which differences, 
however many, are brought to a oneness, at least as 
to the mind's apprehension of them. At each stage 
of such a process, and as often as things which had 
appeared to be irreconcilably unlike and dissonant, or 
contradictory, are brought into relation one to the other 
on some harmonizing principle, there takes place a con- 
sciousness of satisfaction — a rest, as if at length we 
had set foot on firm ground. 

136. When any one who is highly gifted with the 
faculty of order enters upon a department wherein 
confusion has long ruled, mixing and confounding all 



68 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

things, his task — hopeless as at first it seems, and in- 
tolerably laborious — quickly affords him so much of 
this instinctive pleasure that he commences each day's 
work with more and more alacrity : that which had 
appeared as if it must forever defy his skill and indus- 
try has already submitted itself to his reason — it has 
yielded to a law of arrangement ; and at every step 
that is made on the road of order, the next step has 
become more easy, and it is more agreeable. 

137. We take an instance of a different kind. The 
works of a clock — the wheels, the pinions, the barrel, 
and cord and weight, the pendulum, the bell, the striker, 
and the rest, with the wooden framework and supports, 
are confusedly put before me. I am not told what is 
the intention of the machine of which these are the 
parts, nor do I know how they should be put together. 
To make my way through this mass of details, I take 
up the pieces at random, offering them one to the oth- 
er, to ascertain which of them may be made to fit or to 
work together. At length the parts of the machine 
become grouped, two, three, or more together. These 
groups are then conjecturally assorted ; and after a 
while, as each successful adjustment indicates another, 
the machine has become one — the parts constitute a 
whole ; and the feeling with which I survey the result 
of my labor is nearly the same as that with which I 
had looked at the restored vase. 

138. I then use the winch : the cord is wound upon 
the barrel ; the weight is at its limit of height ; but all 
is motionless, and, so far as I can see, it is purposeless 
also. But by accident I jog the pendulum, and instant- 
ly it is as if life were breathed into this congeries of 



METAPHYSICS : SENSE OF FITNESS AND ORDER 69 

brass circles : all is now at work ; and this spectacle 
of accordant rotation awakens a new feeling of satis- 
faction. There is before me not only a perfect fitting 
of parts, but a fitness of all the parts — not one except- 
ed — to promote this tranquil and uniform scheme of 
revolution ; and, moreover, beyond this fitness there is 
order, for there is a series of adjustments, as well as 
a collocation of them. The hands, for whatever pur- 
pose, traverse the figured dial, the one at twelve times 
the speed of the other. At equal distances, as meas- 
ured and figured on the dial, the bell is struck, and it 
is struck as many times as the hands have made rev- 
olutions, or have traversed equal parts of the circle. 

139. Let it now be by chance that I notice the 
agreement of the motions of this machine with the 
diurnal revolution of the earth : the machine I find 
to be in accordance with the planetary mechanism, 
and thus its purpose becomes manifest. The per- 
ception of this purpose awakens a new feeling, or it 
greatly enhances that which had already been excited. 
I now look at the machine as one in regard to the 
structure of its parts, and it is ONE also in respect of 
the equable movement which ensues when its moving 
force is brought into combination with the counteract- 
ive movement of the pendulum ; and beyond this I 
find it to be one in respect of its ultimate intention or 
final cause ; and this intention is in harmony with the 
mechanism of the heavens. A worthy intention, well 
and perfectly secured ! and it yields me an aid that is 
inestimably important in the distribution and allot- 
ment of my labors through the day : itself it is a sym- 
bol of order, and it is the source of order to those whose 
servant it is. 



70 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

140. To note and to take account of differences is 
the first instinct of reason ; to note and take account 
of a sameness connecting such differences, and reduc- 
ing them to accordance, is the second instinct of reason. 
When the one duly follows the other, reason comes to 
its rest, or to its state of acquiescence ; and this rest 
takes its character from that condition of the mind to 
which, at the moment, it happens to he opposed. For 
instance, it may be opposed to confusion or distraction ; 
it may he opposed to the sense of contrariety, or inco- 
herence and incongruity ; or it may he opposed to 
doubt or to disbelief. 

141. To each of these antagonisms this rest of the 
intellect brings relief, or it entirely composes them. 
Our present purpose is to show in what way the ac- 
quiescence which is obtainable from the sense of order 
and fitness affords a true and valid counteraction to 
the disquiet and the skepticism which are the fruit of 
metaphysical speculations, when such speculations have 
engaged the mind in an exclusive manner for a length 
of time. 



VII. 

GrROUNDS OP CERTAINTY IN RELATION TO METAPHYS- 
ICAL SPECULATION. 

142. As to any of those instinctive convictions or 
assumptions which are the basis of our intellectual 
structure, and from which all reasoning must take its 
start, it would be a mere solecism to ask for logical 
■proof of their certainty. No meaning can attach to 



METAPHYSICS: GROUNDS OF CERTAINTY. 71 

the words in which such a demand might be con- 
veyed. 

143. Propositions that are indeed susceptible of 
logical treatment for the purpose of establishing them 
as certain will always contain two or more ideas, the 
connection between which may be shown to be such 
as is therein affirmed, or the contrary ; but an intuition 
or an instinctive conviction has no constituents ; it has 
no parts ; there is nothing in it that is complex, or 
that implies any sort of interior relationship. 

144. We believe those things which may be shown 
to be certain or to be probable by exhibiting their in- 
ferential connection with some other thing that has 
been assumed as indisputable, and which is anterior to 
the matter in question. But these intuitions, by the 
very terms in which they are conveyed, can have noth- 
ing anterior to themselves, nor can they ever come be- 
fore us in the form of inferences that are logically valid. 
Why do you believe your own existence ? There can 
be no room for a "why" in this case: the cogito, 
ergo sum, is a mere quibble ; it is an unmeaning 
play upon words. 

145. But is this the fact, then, that, as to the cer- 
tainty of our knowledge, and as to the foundations of 
human reason, we must be content to float over an 
abyss into which we dare not look, and concerning 
which we must ask no questions ? It is even so in 
one sense, but it is not so in another. 

146. We must have misunderstood the structure of 
the human intellect as an engine of thought if we have 
set it to work frontwise toward the elements of knowl- 
edge. In like manner we should misinterpret Nature 



72 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

if, instead of digesting food, we should labor to digest 
elements. It is the practice of engineers, in drawing 
the plan and elevation of a complicated machine, to 
put arrows here and there upon the rotatory parts, in 
order to show the direction of the movement, where 
else it might be misunderstood. We must not set the 
wheels agoing as from the product toward the power, 
but as from the power toward th*«f rt**!^*. 

147. After all, then, and at the best, is there no cer- 
tainty to be obtained in the region of mental science ? 

:Must we be content always to take things for grant- 
ed? Is it in the department of mathematical science 
alone that absolute knowledge or full assurance is to 
be looked for ? If it be so, our prospects are gloomy. 

148. On what grounds do you rest this implied dis- 
tinction between mathematical and mental science? 
You will find there is nothing valid in any such dis- 
tinction. Mathematical demonstration is a process of 
reasoning which always flows in the descending direc- 
tion : it commences with principles anterior to which 
there is nothing that is susceptible of proof; these 
must be simply assumed ; you must submit to take 
them for granted ; and you must do this, not because 
there is nothing mysterious and perplexing imbedded 
in mathematical axioms — for there is — but because the 
human mind is furnished with no solvents for digest- 
ing these elements. Give it any sort of combination, 
and it will analyze it, and then go on. 

149. Alike — precisely alike — in mental and in math- 
ematical science, assurance — certainty — demonstra- 
tion, and a perfect conviction of truth and reality, are 
to be obtained among the jprcdticts of reason, but not 



metaphysics: grounds of ceetainty. 73 

higher up than that level where these products begin 
to appear. The difference as to certainty between 
mental and mathematical evidence belongs to the means 
employed for the notation of the process and of the con- 
clusion arrived at. We may arrive at certainty in the 
one department as surely as in the other ; but in the 
one case we possess the means of noting what we have 
done to-day, and of finding it to-morrow, or a year 
hence, just what and where we left it ; in the other 
case — more or less so — we are compelled to retrace our 
steps as often as we would recover precisely our for- 
mer position. 

150. Practically, then, what is our resource ? There 
is a resource, and it is such that, unless the individ- 
ual mind is ill constructed, or has sustained damage 
from some mistaken treatment, it abundantly sub- 
serves its purpose. We find what we need in that 
sense of fitness and order of which just now we have 
spoken. 

151. When proof is demanded of that first of all 
certainties, our own existence, it appears that the most 
valid answer which we can give — if it must be given 
with logical formality — is nothing better than a quib- 
ble — cogito, ergo sum. We may well call this grave 
pretense of demonstration a quibble ; for, as soon as I 
come to attach any distinguishable meaning to the 
cogito, I have laid hold of whatever may be contained 
in the sum, and vice versd. The ergo, therefore, can 
express no inferential dependence of the one term upon 
the other. 

152. If, then, I can not logically establish the cer- 
tainty of my own existence at this passing moment, 

T> 



74 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

when, with the most confidence, I believe myself to 
exist, how can I furnish any such evidence of my ex- 
istence in time past, or how prove my continuous per- 
sonal identity through the lapse of years ? Why 
should I believe this imagined recollection of the gone- 
by time — these days and years past — to be any thing 
more real than so many phenomena, making up to- 
gether the one phenomenon of my existence at this 
moment ? They may be so, and nothing more ; and 
if the containing phenomenon — the now existence — 
can not be logically vouched for, then we must of ne- 
cessity abandon the contained phenomena — the past — 
as a surmise only. If so, then, as to the entire notion 
of personal existence and continuity of being, we must, 
it seems, humbly crave indulgence to retain it as a 
matter of convenience, but to which we can advance 
no legal claim. 

153. Those who have not done themselves the jus- 
tice to peruse certain books of a profound class may 
well be excused if they should imagine that reason- 
ings of this order could never be seriously advanced 
or pursued by any but the insane. Yet it is not so. 
He who persists in the endeavor to push forward after 
the abstractive process has reached its end, can do 
nothing but exhibit himself whirling in an eddy where 
he loses his hold of common sense. 

154. Let it for a moment be imagined, not that 
we should attempt to make good by logic that which 
logic has no power either to establish or to impugn, 
but that the reality of our continuous consciousness, 
and the faith we have in our personal identity, through 
a track of time, were allowed to need correlative con- 



metaphysics: grounds of certainty. 75 

firmation, or to admit of some attestation for its bet- 
ter support. 

155. In showing whence any such confirmatory ev- 
idence might, if indeed it were needed, he drawn, it 
must not be imagined that we have any object in view 
beyond this, namely, to exemplify a method of which 
some use may be made hereafter on occasions where a 
degree of ambiguity may be admitted to present itself. 

156. Let, then, any one imagine that he retains a 
perfect recollection of the dreams of the past night, 
and, moreover, that he remembers the dreams of the 
nights of many weeks or months. In this case he will 
have in his view, as we might say, two masses or bod- 
ies of continuous being, or two consciousnesses, and 
then, with the two outstretched and distinctly in pros- 
pect, and which, though similar in their elements, dif- 
fer very much in their characteristics, he may ask to 
which of these two series shall he attribute reality, and 
of which shall he affirm that it is true — not merely 
true in so far as his consciousness is concerned, but 
true objectively, and real also, in its bearing upon the 
outer world and upon other men ? They are not both 
true alike, for in various particulars the two contradict 
or exclude each other ; if the one series be true, the 
other must be false. Or shall he deny reality to both 
alike ? 

157. We must decide between the dream-life and 
the day-life in some other way than by giving our con- 
fidence to that one of the two which always asserts its 
own reality. However strange or monstrous a dream 
may be, we do not, while dreaming, question its real- 
ity ; we passively accept it as real ; and hence the 



76 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

liveliness of the pleasure which attends the moment 
of awaking from a distressing dream — the phantasm 
is "only a dream!" But now it has happened to 
many in the course of years, and on occasion of- some 
new and agitating event, to doubt, for a moment, the 
reality of what is taking place around them, and they 
exclaim, " This must be a dream ; it can not be true; 
am I sleeping or waking ?" 

158. Here, then, we have before us — and they 
stand as rival claimants to our confidence — the two 
halves or two distinguishable constituents of our en- 
tire consciousness ; here is the dream portion and the 
(so called) waking portion ; dream-life and day-life are 
litigants in the court of consciousness. As to the one, 
while it is present, we never doubt its reality ; but 
as to the other, we do sometimes call it in question. 
Why, then, should we give judgment against the uni- 
formly confident party, and give it in favor of the 
party which actually falters sometimes, and which, at 
moments, we are inclined to disallow ? Am I certain 
that I am not, in this instance, taking up the unreal 
and rejecting the substantial? 

159. The grounds of this constant judgment are 
obvious. If I take up the successive dreams of only 
a single night, I find them much to resemble so many 
fragments picked up at random from a heap of broken 
potteries : there may, perhaps, prevail throughout the 
mass a certain tone or color, whether sombre or gay, 
but I can not bring them to fit, edge to edge, in any 
way ; the fragments have no continuity ; or let me 
take the dreams of Monday night entire, and endeavor 
to join them on to the dreams of Tuesday night, and 



METAPHYSICS : GEOUNDS OP CERTAINTY. 77 

so labor to weave the week's dreams into a continuous 
fabric. This can never be done ; there is no splicing 
of such fragments ; there is no cohesion between them ; 
there is no oneness. 

160. But, on the contrary, however strange and un- 
looked-for may have been the Tuesday's events, Tues- 
day fits on to the Monday, its predecessor, and we 
find it is even now fitting itself on to Wednesday. 
The day portions, though they are severed always one 
from the other by the intervening periods of dream- 
life, yet do they invariably coalesce ; they melt into a 
congruous mass ; they gather coherence as they flow 
forward ; the diversified experiences of days, months, 
years, lodge themselves in the consciousness as a 
ivkole; and although the earlier and the more remote 
portions of the series are becoming less and less dis- 
tinct, yet, as often as we turn the eye toward them for 
the purpose of retracing their connection with what 
has followed, we find we are able to do so, and thus, 
from time to time, we reperuse our personal history, 
and we do so with an undoubting assurance of its 
reality. 

161. This confidence, this perfect assurance, is a 
result of the structure of the Mind. It is not, in any 
case, through a circuit of inferences, or by linking to- 
gether propositions, that we are induced to accept as 
true and real that which bears upon itself the charac- 
teristics of coherence, congruity, fitness, order. It is 
with an instantaneous and involuntary confidence that 
we do this. In the case which has just now been im- 
agined, the dream-life, unless the mind itself were bor- 
dering upon insanity, could never stand a moment's 



78 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

competition with the waking life, as though it also 
might pretend to he real : it is fragmentary, incoher- 
ent, and non-continuous. 

162. But even this, though a sufficient ground, is 
not the only ground of its rejection. Mind, as to its 
primary element — the one element which is its first 
characteristic — is Power. Power is more or less in 
act at different times and in different minds, and in 
every mind it is subject to seasons of quiescence — it 
is in abeyance. In perfect sleep, the Mind, as to its 
power, is wholly quiescent ; it has thrown the reins 
from the hand ; its control over the voluntary muscles 
is abrogated ; and so is its control over itself: it lies 
prostrate ; it is the victim of whatever phantasms may 
hurry across the field of the passive consciousness ; 
and it may suffer intensities of anguish while it is in 
this helpless condition. 

163. But if "the night cometh, so also the morn- 
ing ;" and at the moment of awaking we gladly throw 
off from us, as no parts of ourselves, these shams of 
real life, whether they may have been gay or sad. 
And why do we do so ? Because the Mind, in respect 
of its primary element, has had no part in these trans- 
actions, and can not be called to account in respect of 
them : it has not been the Ego that has so spoken or 
that has so acted. No adhesions at any points have 
had place between the mind and the scenes, the per- 
sons, the events of the dream ; all is to us as though 
it had not been, and the sooner it is cast off and for- 
gotten the better. 

164. We gain, then, an assurance doubly sure of 
the truth and reality of our conscious day-life when 



METAPHYSICS : GROUNDS OF CERTAINTY. 79 

the sense of fitness, order, and coherence comes to 
conjoin itself with the consciousness of power, mixing 
itself intimately with those elements of consciousness 
in relation to which the mind is only passive. 

165. It is in another kind of way that the interac- 
tion or the inter-relationship of power and passivity in 
our consciousness gives us the irresistible assurance of 
truth and reality when we have to do with beings like 
ourselves around us. 

166. When I believe myself to be conversing with 
others like myself, listening to them, replying, con- 
futing their opinions, pleading for my individual inter- 
ests as opposed to theirs, why may not the whole re- 
solve itself into so many phenomena of my own con- 
sciousness ? In fact, have there not been hours of 
reverie in which such disputations have had place in 
my mind, and which I have acknowledged to be of 
home manufacture? Why may not all be products 
of the same inventive faculty ? Let it be granted that, 
logically, we must fail in absolutely excluding such a 
supposition. 

167. In fact, no hypothesis of this kind ever lodges 
itself in the Mind as if it were entitled to a place there 
as, probable. Why it does not is easily understood. 
In the first place, the parts that are severally acted, 
the opinions that are professed, and the modifications 
which these undergo, as related to our own acts and 
opinions," are all separately coherent, and they are ad- 
hesive, part to part, and also one with the others. 
They are not fragmentary, as are the dreams of a 
night ; they are explicable on the hypothesis of their 
objective reality, but not otherwise. 



80 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

168. But, in the second place, as in the succession 
of dreams we take no part voluntarily, or in the exer- 
cise of power, and therefore reject the whole when we 
awake because it is not of ourselves, on the contrary, 
when we have to do with others, we not only bring 
ourselves into coalescence with the succession of events 
by exertion of our own power, but we meet another 
sort of evidence of the objective reality of the encoun- 
ter in the antagonism of a will which plants itself 
athwart the path on which we would fain advance. 
The reality of the Mind-world, in the midst of which 
we are placed, is thus trebly vouched for : first, by 
its coherence and its internal consistency ; secondly, by 
its immediate relationship to that which is the essence 
of the Mind — its own controlling force ; and, thirdly, 
by the contrariety of forces, or a resistance which we 
can not overcome, and which, intuitively, we attribute 
to a will foreign to our own, and as real. 

169. It should be well understood that the ground 
of confidence in all these instances is not that of a 
process of reasoning, shutting us up to a conclusion 
which we can not reject, but it arises from the struc- 
ture of the Mind, which yields itself involuntarily to 
the conviction of truth whenever it becomes cognizant 
of fitness, order, coherence, and unity of intention. 
This conviction combines itself with the consciousness 
of its own inherent force. Thus it is that when the 
Mind acts in relation to what is coherent, it does not 
need to persuade itself of the reality of what it has to 
do with any more than it does of the truth of an axiom 
in geometry. 

170. In speaking of those mixed abstractions (from 



METAPHYSICS : GEOUNDS OF CERTAINTY. 81 

80 to 99) which are conveyed by the words power, 
causation, liberty, necessity, and the like, we arrived 
at a conditional conclusion, which was to this effect : 
that although there might seem to be reason for reject- 
ing our first impressions as to the liberty of animal 
volitions, and although we might, by a sort of force, 
yield to the doctrine of universal physical causation, 
as prevalent alike in the worlds of matter and of mind, 
yet that an instinctive conviction — stronger than logic, 
because anterior to it — rebels against this belief, and 
brings us over, again and again, to a very different 
persuasion. 

171. Let it be granted that, in those modes of for* 
mal reasoning which are assumed to be infallible, it 
may be made to appear that the revolution of planets 
and satellites in their orbits, and that the whirling ot 
autumnal leaves in the wind, and that the gambols of 
insects in the summer's breeze, and, not less certainly, 
the volitions and actions of men on the great theatre 
of life, are determined, and are predetermined, irrevo- 
cably and fixedly, under the domination of physical 
law — law taking effect whether it be upon masses of 
matter, or upon animal organizations, or upon minds, 
and this in such a manner as to forbid our allowing 
room for any distinction, in a philosophic sense, be- 
tween any one order of sequences and any other order. 

172. All this may be alleged, and it may be ex- 
pressed in the style of demonstrative reasoning; and 
it may be said that none ever resist this sort of gener- 
alization unless it be those who are wanting in the 
logical faculty, or those in whose minds vulgar preju- 
dices prevail over scientific accuracy. 

D 2 



82 THE WOKLD OP MIND. 

173. It is much in this way that the materialist 
treats the belief in Mind as something more than a se- 
cretion from the brain. It is in this tone (or nearly 
so) that the spiritualist, on the other side, contemns 
the hypothesis of an external world as a material real- 
ity, a something existing beyond and independently 
of the mind. It was in nearly the same mood of log- 
ical imperiousness that the Aristotelian system of the 
heavens was affirmed to be what the modern astrono- 
my has proved that it is not. 

174. Reason — drawn out in propositions, and these 
propositions syllogistically packed together according 
to rule — as it avails nothing in opening up the myste- 
ries of nature, so is it equally powerless either in es- 
tablishing or in refuting those intuitive and involun- 
tary persuasions which, in all cases, are and must be 
taken as the ground of reasoning. 

175. What that distinction may actually be which 
should forbid our confounding material causation — 
gravitation, chemical affinity, magnetic force — with ani- 
mal causation, or the volitions of Mind, is a physical 
inquiry, in pursuing which the method of reasoning by 
syllogism is a sheer illusion — it is a pedantic frivolity. 
This physical question, we need scarcely say, does not 
belong to Metaphysics. But what we are intending 
is this : to show the path on which certainty is attain- 
able in subjects embraced in metaphysical speculation, 
even independently of any physical investigation. 

176. When we bring into question the volitions of 
Mind, such as we find them developed through the 
medium of the animal organization, and also as these 
volitions belong to our consciousness, the alternative 



METAPHYSICS : GROUNDS OP CERTAINTY. S3 

is this : we may affirm, as above stated, that, in a strict 
and philosophic sense, there is no difference between 
these volitions and the fixed sequences which are tak- 
ing place in the world of inorganic matter ; that is to 
say, no difference in respect of their uniform subjuga- 
tion to law — law, in relation to which matter and Mind 
alike yield to an established scheme of causation an- 
terior to itself. This is one doctrine. 

177. Another belief, and which remains as our al- 
ternative, is this : that the volitions of Mind differ 
from physical sequences in some absolute, though it 
may be inscrutable manner ; that laws, such as those 
of gravitation, chemical affinity, magnetism, vegetative 
growth, and animal life (considered as organization 
merely), do not take effect within the world of Mind ; 
or otherwise worded, that Mind is free in a sense, 
whatever it may be, in which nothing else in the uni- 
verse is free. As we have affirmed that Mind is the 
only power (known to us directly), so we say that it is 
the prerogative of Mind, and of Mind alone, to be free. 

178. But if we are to make our choice between these 
two doctrines, on what ground shall we proceed to do 
so ? The first of these beliefs is recommended by its 
apparent simplicity. There is no causation, we are 
told, but physical causation ; the notion of liberty, in 
any sense whatever, is a popular illusion. Given, in 
any case, the instincts or the dispositions of an animal, 
whether it be man or his fellow-brute, and then tell us 
what are the circumstances that surround him at any 
moment, and we may predict the volition and the act 
as surely and as invariably as Ave do the fall of a stone, 
or the curve of a projectile discharged from a cannon. 



84 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

179. Besides, it is alleged that any other supposi- 
tion, founded on the imagined independence of the 
Mind in its volitions, is inconceivable. Not so the be- 
lief that a volition is precisely a resultant line ; that it 
is the product of two forces, meeting as from different 
directions ; it is a diagonal, which indicates the relative 
intensity of these two forces, namely, the. instinct or 
disposition, and the present circumstance, which is the 
immediate inducement. If it be so, then it is certain 
that physical necessity rules the universe : the uni- 
verse is a machine, all of one order. 

180. Why, then, should we go in search of any oth- 
er doctrine, if this suffices ? Are we likely to find one 
that is more complete or coherent than this ? Is it not 
a generalization that embraces all the phenomena, and 
that brings to an end, or resolves, many perplexing 
questions ? So it may seem ; and yet the question 
returns upon every unsophisticated mind, Does this 
doctrine indeed embrace all the phenomena ? and does 
it consist with those instinctive convictions which are 
anterior to reasoning ? We think not. To this seem- 
ingly philosophic generalization we give way, it is true, 
for an hour, because we do not find ourselves provided 
with a logic which can overthrow it ; but just as it is 
with the hypothesis of the non-existence of an exter- 
nal world, so with this : the moment we go forth into 
the open air, we reject it as a sophism — we spurn it as 
a cobweb — "reason or no reason, it is not so." 

181. But what is there which we may oppose to it ? 
In the first place, it must be granted that this doctrine 
is a precarious philosophy ; for if, within the vast range 
— if in the immensity of the world of mind there should 



metaphysics: grounds of certainty. 85 

present itself so much as one fact, or let us say one 
class of facts, which resists the endeavor to bring it 
under the conditions of fixed physical causation, then 
the theory must be abandoned ; for then, and in that 
case, Mind must be held to differ essentially from all 
other things. 

182. Newton held his theory concerning the law of 
gravitation in suspense, and he abstained from affirm- 
ing it so long as there was room to question what was 
the figure of the earth, whether oblate or prolate, or so 
long as the moon's motion in her orbit was not fully 
determined. On similar grounds we ought to know 
every thing that belongs to the world of Mind, and to 
have acquainted ourselves every where with its illimit- 
able developments — below us and above us — before 
we can warrantably affirm that Mind and matter are 
subjected to law in the same sense. 

183. We shall not fail, while giving attention to 
the development of volition in the animal orders around 
us, to gather the belief (whether we are looking for it 
or not) that there is, at the centre of the animal or- 
ganization, a Third Principle, to which the organic 
sensations of the outer world on the one side, and the 
instincts or appetites of the animal on the other side, 
stand evenly related. Animal action indicates, even 
if it be obscurely, a third element, differing from and 
independent of the other two. 

184. But when we come to contemplate the great 
world of human volition, and when, in an involuntary 
manner, we interpret the phenomena of this world by 
means of our individual consciousness, the persuasion 
comes in upon us with irresistible force, that Mind 



86 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

possesses a prerogative as to its volitions which, dis- 
tinguishes it, not in semblance, not so as if it were a 
difference in degree, but utterly- and essentially, from 
every catenation of causes and effects in the material 
world. Just as we believe (with or without the leave 
of philosophy) that there is a real and objective world, 
in the midst of which we are placed, so do we believe 
(if sophistry be not listened to) that Mind is endowed 
with an independence, a sovereignty, which constitutes 
the very ground of the distinction between itself and 
the material world. 

185. In the region of metaphysical abstractions we 
find, not indeed direct evidence, but an indication of 
what is here assumed to be the distinctive prerogative 
of Mind. 

186. On every track of thought within this region, 
the human mind goes forward, as if the tendency to 
do so sprung from its own structure, toward unity. 
In analytic thought the process is continued until an 
element is arrived at which admits of no more analysis. 
In the process of generalization the mind comes to no 
rest, and does not acquiesce in the result of its labors 
until the comprehension of many constituent principles 
or of a multitude of facts has brought them into a 
single point of view. All phenomena must be reduced 
to a radial adjustment ; they must combine themselves 
as related to a centre. Science confesses itself incom- 
plete until this has been done. 

187. As, in relation to its processes, the human 
mind thus goes on in search of unity, so, as to its own 
consciousness, does there prevail the same tendency 
to gather itself up and to throw off whatever is not of 



METAPHYSICS : GEOUNDS OP CEETAINTY. 87 

itself — whatever, for a time, may have drawn it aside; 
and this tendency (certainly it is so in the most vigor- 
ous minds) takes effect not merely as to impressions 
received through the senses, but as to its own instincts 
— and its individual inclinations — and its impulses, of 
whatever sort they may "be. Mind centralizes itself, 
and it is disquieted until it comes to its rest in doing so. 

188. It ought not to be pretended that facts of this 
kind are conclusive in relation to the question which 
is now in view, for it must be granted that they are 
susceptible of explanation on the hypothesis which we 
incline to reject. But this may be said, that they con- 
sist much better with the one of these assumptions 
than they do with the other, as thus : 

189. Let the instincts, appetites, habits of the ani- 
mal — whether man or brute — be comprehensively rep- 
resented by the letter A ; then the letter B will stand 
for the inducements or the circumstances which at any 
moment are the immediate occasion of a volition or 
action, and the letter C stands for that volition or action. 

190. Animal action, according to the first hypothesis 
above stated, may thus be formulated : it is, Ax B = C. 
But in this case, although C is one, if it be thought of 
in its relation to A and B, which have concurred to 
produce it, it is not ONE in itself, for it is a product 
only ; nor does it represent, nor can it be understood 
to symbolize, that consciousness of unity which de- 
clares itself to be a primary characteristic of Mind. 

191. But if we adopt hypothetically the belief that 
Mind is a simple principle, which connects itself with 
instincts and dispositions accruing to it in consequence 
of its alliance with animal organization, and, as thus 



88 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

furnished, is acted upon by circumstances that are 
exterior to itself, we need not allow to either of these 
forces a sovereign influence, and we reserve for Mind 
its essential unity, and with its unity its sovereignty. 

192. But how might any such hypothesis as this 
be set forth in a series of intelligible propositions ? 
We do not here ask how this might be done ; but, in- 
stead, we find, among the firmest intuitive principles 
of human nature, one instinct which so coalesces with 
this hypothesis, and which so reluctates to coalesce 
with its rival, as may well avail to abate, or entirely 
to override, the merely logical perplexity which stands 
in our way. 

193. The moral sense cleaves to the human mind 
as an element that is inseparable from it. The notions, 
the emotions, and the various sentiments which float 
around this consciousness of moral good and evil — all 
these ingredients of human nature are recognized in 
our inmost convictions as part of ourselves. The 
moral sense may indeed have become perverted, or it 
may have been set in a false direction, or it may have 
lost its vitality ; and, as is the case with other faculties 
(the abstractive, for instance), it may be blunted, en- 
feebled, and apparently dead ; but no such exceptive 
instances avail at all for bringing into doubt the reality 
of this principal element of human nature. 

194. The idea of responsibility and the recognition 
of law — not of physical law, which enforces and vin- 
dicates itself, but of law sanctioned by an authority 
above us, and which is to be vindicated at some future 
time, this idea and this recognition follow us when we 
would run from them ; they meet us ever and again 



metaphysics: geounds op cektainty. 89 

on our path when we may have lost sight of them ; 
they find us when we ask not for them. The moral 
sense and the belief of responsibility demonstrate their 
reality especially in this way — that so many elaborate 
sophistries have been resorted to for the purpose of 
showing that they are not real, and that we may safe- 
ly disregard them. Human nature, we are told, is 
ruled by, and it is the passive subject of, a system of 
causation identical with that which governs the mate- 
rial world. 

195. Does the moral sense — does the recognition 
of right and wrong — do these notions consist with a 
doctrine such as that which we have here named ? 
Let it be granted that it is possible to bring about a 
coalescence between them. Every thing should be 
candidly listened to and freely admitted which has 
been advanced by eminent writers in explanation of 
the apparent incongruity of the two, the doctrine and 
the moral instinct. 

196. But if we still hesitate to profess ourselves 
convinced and satisfied, if still we are conscious of a 
latent doubt, are there not difficulties attaching to any 
other hypothesis ? 

197. Opposed to the belief of the intrinsic property 
of Mind as initiative and sovereign in its volitions, 
there stands the difficulty of giving it expression in 
formal propositions. But this very difficulty may well 
be regarded as an indication of the fact that, at this 
point, we have arrived at an element. If, in truth, 
its initiative power — its sovereignty — be of the very 
essence of Mind, if it be its primary quality, if it be 
that which is its distinction, and which constitutes the 



90 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

difference between itself and matter, then, by conse- 
quence, it must stand beyond the circle of those truths 
which are capable of being reduced to constituent prop- 
ositions. If now at last we have arrived at an ulti- 
mate fact in the philosophy of Mind, then certainly 
we must not expect to prove it to be a truth by exhib- 
iting its dependence upon some principle that has a 
position higher up in the nature of things. 

198. But if we assume this belief in the same way 
in which we assume the fact of our existence and of 
our continuous identity, and as we assume the reality 
of the external world and the existence of other minds 
around us, then we come into the possession of a prin- 
ciple which gives ONENESS to our consciousness, and 
which imparts coherence to the several rudiments of 
human nature, and therefore forms a ground of cer- 
tainty in the region of abstract thought. 

199. In proportion as the moral sense is keen and 
the mind vigorous does the man resent the solace 
which the casuist may offer him when, in any in- 
stance, he confesses himself to be blameworthy. Rath- 
er would he endure the full amount of blame which 
others may throw upon him, or even more than may 
be his due, than listen to the degrading doctrine that 
his conduct in this case, though "unfortunate in its 
issue," was the inevitable product of axb: it was a 
product sure to realize itself in its destined place in 
the chain of eternal causation. A mind that is already 
vitiated, or one that is at once subtle and feeble, may 
accept evasions of this sort, and may persuade itself 
that, in logic, they stand good ; but the strong and the 
firm never do so ; and the warrantable inference is 



METAPHYSICS: GROUNDS OF CERTAINTY. 91 

this : that no process of reasoning can lbe admitted to 
be sound which the consciousness of a well-condition- 
ed mind resents as at variance with those persuasions 
which, if they lbe abandoned, the reasoning faculty it- 
self is broken up. 

200. The sense of fitness and order may be disturb- 
ed as well by a redundancy in any organism as by a 
deficiency. If there be a wheel in a machine which 
has no duty to perform, or if a wheel be wanting at 
any point on the pathway of motion, we disallow the 
unity of the whole. 

201. Let us, for instance, imagine that the chro- 
nometer — complete in its parts and adjustments, and 
faultless in its performance — had come to be endowed 
with a reflective consciousness ; that it knows what it 
is doing, and knows whether it is right with the stars 
or not — in this case there is a faculty which has no 
function ; there is a redundant element ; for the mind 
present in this time-piece can have no more occupation 
than there would be for a mind in a hammer, or a 
broom, or a saw. 

202. It has been fancied that flowers, shrubs, trees, 
are endowed with consciousness ; and how shall we 
assure ourselves that it is not so ? But here again, 
and on that supposition, the mind of the rose and lily, 
of the willow or the oak, has no office, or none that in- 
dicates itself in any result. As to the life and welfare 
of the plant, this imputed mind contributes nothing. 

203. Or we may imagine the carnivorous species to 
be gifted with moral sensibilities — with compassion, 
pity, and a horror at bloodshed, so that it is always 
with extreme reluctance that the tio;er catches and 



92 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

kills the deer. Such a sensitiveness would certainly 
be a redundant endowment, and better withheld. 

204. No such instances of superfluous endowments 
or of sinecure faculties present themselves in nature. 
Every organism is complete for its own purposes, and 
complete in its relation to the system of which it is a 
part, but it is not more than complete. 

205. Yet among our instinctive convictions none 
is more absolute or more persistent than that of the 
moral sense. We feel as if human nature, in respect 
of moral distinctions, differed essentially from all other 
natures with which it might come into comparison. 
We feel as z/'mind in man were endowed with a pow- 
er toward good and evil which gives coherence to its 
consciousness, and which brings its faculties into uni- 
son — a power which so centralizes them as that we 
recognize fitness and order on this ground, as else- 
where, throughout nature. 

206. Hitherto none of those theories by the aid of 
which it has been endeavored to reconcile the doctrine 
of universal physical causation with the instincts of 
our moral consciousness and with the doctrine of re- 
sponsibility have commanded any thing more than a 
sort of comfortless assent. Never have they been free- 
ly accepted elsewhere than in the class-room or the 
study. Like other elaborate subtleties^ they vanish 
as mists under broad daylight. It is so because they 
imply that nature has furnished man with a faculty to 
which no function is assigned. 

207. These theories fail of their purpose not merely 
because they are subtle, but because they stop short 
at the very point where the order of thought demands 






metaphysics: geounds of ceetainty. 93 

that another step should be taken. This further step 
leads onward toward that ONE teuth which, to the hu- 
man mind, must be the beginning and the end of in- 
tellectual steadfastness or rational assurance. If this 
ONE teuth be left out of our philosophy, or if it be 
rejected, then (and it is a matter of fact abundantly- 
confirmed in the history of speculative science) nothing- 
is outspread in our view but a pathless course over a 
dark expanse. 

208. An elementary book such as this could not be 
supposed to embrace a religious argument, nor is it 
within the writer's purpose to furnish reasons availa- 
ble on the side of theology ; but yet, wherever the 
course of thought ought to carry us, there we must go 
on, whether we are individually mindful of religion 
or not. 

209. By following the course of thought, I mean 
this — that, as often as any abstract notion indicates 
some other notion in advance of itself, we should go 
in quest of it. " On to the end" is the law of thought 
when we profess to be thinking coherently. But the 
end, in any case, is that notion or principle which gives 
no notice of another beyond it which might lie within 
range of the human faculties. 

210. The moral sense — the feeling of right and 
wrong — the judgments we form concerning disposi- 
tions or actions, that they are praiseworthy or blame- 
worthy — these elements of human nature are, as we 
have said, among the firmest of its constituents, and 
they often give proof of their reality with an energy 
that is peculiarly intense. 

211. But now the moral sense indicates that which 



94 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

is above itself and beyond itself; therefore, if it be our. 
rule to follow always the course of thought, we must 
now go forward at this suggestion, and it leads us di- 
rectly to the conception, however vague, of an author- 
ity to which we are related. This conception, under 
all imaginable distortions, has accompanied human na- 
ture — invariably it is the instinctive belief of man. 

212. The idea of an authority beyond and above us 
conjoins itself with the conception of a power, and of 
a purpose too, to vindicate itself, whether immediately 
or at some time future. It is this set of notions which 
gives coherence to the moral sense. Without them 
no aspect of fitness presents itself on this side of hu- 
man nature. 

213. The idea of authority, or of a relationship 
between two beings, each endowed with intelligence 
and moral feeling, supposes that the will of the one 
who is the more powerful of the two has been in some 
way declared. It also demands an- independence of 
some kind in the other nature intervening between the 
one will and the other will. Where the relationship 
of law, not as a physical principle, but as a rule and 
motive, is brought in, then there we must find a break, 
an interval, and a reciprocal counteraction. 

214. A scheme of government taking its bearing 
upon the moral sense is not a chain along which se- 
quences follow in a constant order, but it is a standing 
on one side and a standing on the other side, with a 
clear distance interposed. If we take fewer elements 
than these as the ground of moral government, the en- 
tire vocabulary of morals, popular and scientific, loses 
its significance. 



metaphysics: grounds of certainty. 95 

215. In the material world law is latent, and it 
makes itself known in the effect only ; but in the mor- 
al world, while there is also a law that is latent, there 
is a law that is declaratory, and which (in whatever 
manner) must proclaim itself anteriorly to the effect, 
and irrespectively of it. 

216. On this ground, then, the course of thought 
leads us to postulate for Mind an independence which 
is peculiar to itself, and without which the moral sense 
would Tbe a faculty without a function. 

217. From this point we must advance to the be- 
lief of an Independent Power superior to ourselves, 
and to which we stand related. At the moment when 
we reach this point, and when we bring our concep- 
tions of fitness and order to a centre upon that one 
truth which is the basis of abstract theology, it is 
then, and never, if not thus, that the human Mind at- 
tains to an assured intellectual resting-place. 

218. We sum up what has been advanced in rela- 
tion to metaphysical speculation in this way : 

219. Analytic thought or pure abstraction, pursued 
to its rudiments, can never yield an assurance of truth. 

220. Assurance of truth must be the product of con- 
cretive or synthetic thought when it issues in bringing 
before us a system of fitness and order. 

221. A system of government has no completeness 
or reason — it exhibits no fitness or order, until we rec- 
ognize its source in the sovereign rectitude — the 
divine personal wisdom and goodness. On this 
path metaphysical speculation leads to certainty; on 
no other path has it ever done so. 



96 THE WORLD OF MIND. 



VIII. 

SCIENCE OF MIND— PHYSICAL. 

THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN ANIMAL PHYSIOLOGY AND 
THE SCIENCE OF MIND. 

222. With the world of Mind before us as our 
subject, nothing is more important than to ascertain, 
and to do so in the clearest manner, the ground of 
that distinction which we assume to be real between 
what belongs to Animal Physiology and that which is 
proper to Mental Philosophy. A misapprehension on 
this ground brings with it a train of errors, and leads 
the way toward fruitless speculations. 

223. In the preceding sections it has been attempt- 
ed to set off from our general subject the results of the 
abstractive faculty over which the mind has, or may 
have, an entire control, being, as they are, its own prod- 
ucts. The region of metaphysical speculation may 
thus be so fenced about as that there shall be no in- 
terference on this side with what is properly physical 
in Mental Philosophy.* 

224. But the partition which we have now before 
us is of a kind that is not so easily effected. At our 

* The term Physical Science is here and elsewhere employed in 
its more usual and restricted sense as relating to the phenomena 
and laws of the material world. But in this book it is also employed 
in its more extended sense, as embracing Mental Science ; and, as 
thus used, Physical Mental Philosophy is opposed to that which is 
Metaphysical. 



PHYSIOLOGY AND MENTAL SCIENCE. 97 

starting it was said that we have no direct knowledge 
of Mind otherwise than as it is conjoined with animal 
organization. The mode or the medium of this com- 
bination is utterly unknown, and (we must think so) 
it is quite inscrutable. This is certain, however, that 
the reciprocal influences of the animal organization, 
and of the Mind lodged therein, are most intimate and 
constant, so that we are seldom able to take up any 
set of phenomena or any class of facts as belonging to 
either mind or body with a perfect certainty that they 
are wholly exempt from influences derived from the 
other. 

225. Or the ground of perplexity may be thus 
stated : While there is much in the animal organiza- 
tion and its functions which we may believe to be 
only remotely, if at all, affected by Mind, and, on the 
other hand, while there is much in the operations of 
Mind which can be only remotely, if at all, affected by 
the animal functions, there is still more, on both sides, 
in relation to which an intimate interaction of the two 
is a fact unquestionable. Nevertheless, a rule must 
be found which shall enable us to deal with ambigu- 
ous instances of this sort in such a way as may keep 
us exempt from confusion and error. This rule is, 
therefore, now to be sought for, and it is such as re- 
solves itself into two or three postulates, as thus : 

226. (a) A professedly scientific generalization, if it 
be brought forward for the purpose of throwing light 
upon any phenomena that may be in question, must 
show that it has an intelligible congeuity with the 
subject to which it is applied. 

227. (b) When facts or phenomena of any kind ap- 

E 



98 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

pear to combine influences, affinities, forces, of differ- 
ent kinds — as, for instance, some that are mechanical 
and some that are chemical — the methods of reasoning 
proper to each of these principles must be carried out 
only to the extent within which they are unquestion- 
ably applicable thereto, and not a step further. 

228. (c) That partition of subjects which we should 
endeavor to establish in relation to animal organiza- 
tion and Mind is not of the nature of a prohibition^ 
which is set up on the one side for the purpose of lim- 
iting the advances of inquiry on the other side, but its 
intention is this : to maintain the distinction between 
the two — a distinction admitted to be founded upon 
the nature of things, and to forget which is to fall into 
error. 

229. Two or three instances will suffice for showing 
that this rule, as thus set forth, is reasonable, and that 
it is in accordance with the established usages of mod- 
ern science. 

230. The first of these postulates (a) has been dis- 
regarded in innumerable instances. Every department 
of science {science it was not) had been vitiated by the 
neglect of it in the times anterior to the rise of our 
modern philosophy. The anatomist and the physiol- 
ogist, believing that they could explain the functions 
of animal life on the principles of mechanics, talked 
of the weight and pressure of fluids, and of the elastic 
forces of the "animal spirits;" and especially by the 
help of "vibrations," of which the pulpy substances 
of the body were affirmed to be susceptible, it was 
supposed that sensation and volition were rendered 
intelligible ; for if only we will admit the hypothesis 



PHYSIOLOGY AND MENTAL SCIENCE. 99 

that the brain is much like a harp or a piano-forte, 
then the mystery of the Mind's relationship to matter 
is cleared up. 

231. There must be, as we say, a congruity between 
a theory and the facts of which it is intended to give 
an explanation, as thus : we look to the mechanical 
structure of the compass — the suspended needle, the 
box inclosing it, and the graduated and lettered circle 
over which this needle oscillates. The mechanism is 
simple and intelligible. But when we find that this 
slender wire, whenever its rest may be disturbed, still 
reverts, with a tremulous constancy, to its first posi- 
tion as related to the horizon, then there comes before 
us a fact, or a class of facts, of which the mechanical 
structure of the apparatus offers no sort of solution. 
Let mechanical principles be applied to this phenome- 
non with all imaginable ingenuity, they utterly fail to 
yield us the smallest aid. We must seek it from some 
other quarter ; and although, even in its advanced 
state, magnetic science is far from standing clear of 
mysteries, yet it does avail to connect the polarity of 
the needle with a mass of phenomena elsewhere ob- 
servable, so that, in a sense, or to a certain extent, this 
constant tendency may be said to be understood. At 
the least, we are effectively diverted from the futile 
endeavor to explain it on mechanical principles. 

232. But now let us imagine that the magnetic 
needle should exhibit a sensibility to music ; that it 
becomes tremulous at the swell of the organ ; and that, 
at the sound of the human voice, it oscillates rhyth- 
mically; that it moves from JST.W. by N. to N.E. by 
N. consonantly with the hand of one who is beating 



100 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

time in a concert. This would be a fact quite of 
another order ; and we must seek an explication of it 
elsewhere than within the range either of mechanical 
or of magnetic influences. 

233. One further step we may take in this illustra- 
tion. Let it be that the needle should indicate its 
consciousness of a conversation that is going on near 
to where it stands. When certain subjects are brought 
forward, it becomes agitated ; it dips and rises, as if 
nodding assent ; or it performs gyrations — stops at a 
moment, and starts again, as the argument is resumed. 
In this imaginable case we are thrown upon a new 
path, for there is presented to our view a class of phe- 
nomena that has no intelligible congruity with those 
of which physical science takes account. It would be 
a futile endeavor to resolve such facts into chemical, 
or electrical, or magnetic influences. 

234. In any such instance, if we were asked to lis- 
ten to explanations of this kind, we should turn from 
them, not merely because we might think them untrue 
or insufficient, but because they are unintelligible. To 
the propositions conveying any such pretended expla- 
nation we could attach no meaning. 

235. Pretended and yet fruitless explanations of 
facts belonging to the world of Mind have very often 
been advanced, and they have been maintained and 
defended with equal zeal and ingenuity. But what is 
the aid which they afford in the interpretation of such, 
facts ? None whatever ; for the terms in which they 
are expressed, though intelligible in relation to the 
world of matter, retain no shadow of meaning when 
they are carried across to the world of Mind. 



PHYSIOLOGY AND MENTAL SCIENCE. 101 

236. A galvanic current indicates itself through a 
thousand miles ot wire, or it excites anew the muscu- 
lar irritability of an animal recently dead. I do not 
know how it is that the action of a diluted acid upon 
a pair of metallic plates should produce these and 
other effects, hut yet they are facts that associate 
themselves intelligibly with many others, and they are 
congruous with the phenomena of the material world : 
they come into their places in those sciences which 
have to do with things that are visible, palpable, odor- 
ous, sapid, sonorous. 

237. And thus also the marvels of Photography 
range themselves with the known principles of chemi- 
cal science. What may be the inner nature of the 
actinic ray is, as well as all other "inner natures," 
wholly unknown ; but Chemistry, in clearing up, so 
far as it can, the mystery of the sun-picture, speaks 
its own language — goes to work in its oion way / and 
it finds itself already acquainted with analogous facts 
nearly resembling these new phenomena. 

238. But now the sight of pain or want excites 
pity, and this feeling leads me to make self-denying 
efforts for its relief. A geometric figure placed before 
me suggests the truth which it symbolizes, and it 
prompts a train of thought, in the course of which the 
mode ot demonstrating that truth becomes evident. 
In attempting to give the philosophy of any mental 
condition or intellectual process such as these, I do 
not advance a step by talking of chemical affinities, or 
of the definite proportions ot atoms, or of galvanic en- 
ergies, or ot medullary vibrations, or of nervous ten- 
sions. All this show of philosophy is pure illusion. 



102 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

No mind that is capable of consistent thought can 
bring the forms and phrases of physical science into 
relationship with the processes or the varying condi- 
tions of the Mind. 

239. Mind and matter, however intimately com- 
bined they may be, are two natures, not one. Until 
we assume this principle as our basis, the sciences 
which bear upon the two, severally, are found to viti- 
ate each other. The world of Mind challenges for 
itself a mode of treatment proper to itself, and with 
which the philosophy of animal organization may in- 
termix itself only so far as its language may be inter- 
pretable in its own lower sphere. 

240. The world of Mind, in behalf of which this 
challenge is made, comprehends, as we have said, all 
orders of beings that indicate powers of perception and 
a centralized consciousness, and that are locomotive 
from within ; in a word, all that have been put in 
trust of their individual welfare. 

241. The terms and phrases by means of which we 
may convey our notion of Mind as lodged in the an- 
imal organization may be varied indefinitely. The 
wording of such a notion is not a matter of great im- 
portance, for at the best it can only be an approxima- 
tion toward precision ; it can be no more where the 
things spoken of are indeterminately known ; and it 
is better not to affect a fixed phraseology which as- 
sumes to know what we do not know. 

242. In whatever terms we give expression to such 
ideas as we may form of Mind corporeally lodged, the 
elementary idea so conveyed is that of two related na- 
tures, the properties of which are, in the most absolute 



PHYSIOLOGY AND MENTAL SCIENCE. 103 

manner, opposed, the one set to the other set. What- 
ever is distinctive of the one nature is therefore to be 
denied of the other. Whatever is in the one nature 
is not in the other. 

243. Consciousness of the properties of matter is 
the prerogative of Mind. Matter (as we now assume) 
has no such sensibility. Initiative power is the pre- 
rogative of Mind. Matter is endued with no initiative 
power — it does not put itself in motion. Mind is not 
solid, or fluid, or gaseous ; nor has it contour, or out- 
line ; nor is it blue, or red, or white, or black ; it is 
not sweet or bitter ; it has not any of these properties, 
because it has consciousness of them as the properties 
of matter ; it knows them because they are not of 
itself. 

244. If what we here assume be true, then it will 
necessarily follow that Mind and matter must each 
have its philosophy to itself. The modes of reason- 
ing proper to the one can only be delusive if carried 
over to the other. That this is the fact might very 
safely be inferred from what hitherto has been the is- 
sue, without an exception, of the many ingenious the- 
ories propounded, with the intention of laying open the 
world of Mind by the help of chemistry, or any of 
those sciences that are properly called Physical. Every 
theory resting upon this basis has presently gone off 
into some quackery, noised for a while among the un- 
educated, and soon forgotten. 



104 THE WOULD OF MIND. 



IX. 

BEEADTH OP THE WORLD OP MIND. 

245. The one expression already employed (240) 
as distinctive of the community of Mind is sufficiently 
precise to serve our immediate purpose. This com- 
monwealth includes, we say, all those orders of beings 
that are endowed with sensibilities and with powers 
fitting them to be put in trust, individually, of their 
own well-being. 

246. So much as this can not be affirmed of any 
species usually included in the vegetable kingdom. 
The individual plant is, indeed, well cared for in the 
constitution of the world around it ; but if, in any in- 
stance, its well-being comes to be out of accordance 
with that constitution, it perishes without help ; if 
light, warmth, moisture, or certain elements in the soil 
fail it where it stands, the plant dies. 

247. The animal finds itself existing from hour to 
hour, as we might say, precariously ; for it lives al- 
ways on that border where its welfare is every mo- 
ment tending to get out of accordance with the consti- 
tution of the outer world, and where it will speedily 
perish unless rescued by an exercise of its faculties. 
By its own efforts it must bring itself again into due 
relationship therewith ; if it should fail to care for it- 
self (in so far as its structure implies that it should do 
so), the elements will not care for it ; nor will its own, 
nor other species, care for it. Death is the penalty of 



BEEADTH OP THE WORLD OF MIND. 105 

the remissness or of the helplessness of the individual 
animal. 

248. This condition of trusteeship for the individu- 
al life implies, by necessity, the possession of faculties 
of perception toward the outer world, and a conscious- 
ness of organic pain and pleasure, and the power and 
the means of locomotion ; and with these, a prehensile 
mechanical structure. These conditions again imply 
sensorial centralization, or a ONE CONSCIOUSNESS more 
or less reflective. This one consciousness is Mind ; 
or we may prefer to speak of it as the product of Mind. 

249. When, in terms so comprehensive as these, we 
open a way into the great theatre of life — conscious 
life — we enter what must be to us a scene infinitely 
extended. How vast are the dimensions of this stage 
of intelligence — this consciousness of enjoyment and 
of suffering ! 

250. But it is likely that, upon the very threshold 
of this theatre, exception may be taken, and some may 
even resent the invitation to enter precincts within 
which the dignity and high prerogatives of human na- 
ture seem to be compromised or to be brought into 
jeopardy. A feeling of this sort will, however, give 
way, after a little reflection, to feelings quite of an op- 
posite kind. 

251. An undefined repugnance to consort ourselves 
with the countless animal orders around us, and to 
think of them as our fellows, and to regard the her- 
bivora and the carnivora — the mammals, and the mol- 
lusks, and the infusoria, as tenants in common of the 
planet, leaves us liable to be scandalized at every turn 
by palpable instances of the fact of this fellowship. 

E2 



106 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

But if we bring ourselves to look well to the grounds 
of the alleged agreement, and then acquaint ourselves 
with the reasons of the difference, and if we under- 
stand the boundless extent of that difference, we shall 
exempt ourselves ever afterward from all disagreeable 
revulsions of feeling such as we now suppose. 

252. In fact, much of that which is to invite atten- 
tion in this elementary book will consist of an exhibi- 
tion, first, of what is common to all orders of living 
beings, and then a setting forth of what is peculiar to 
the human mind, and which is the ground of its im- 
measurable superiority. 

253. Our modern science, with its explorative in- 
struments, brings us into position for looking around 
us through space and time in a manner which was not 
possible to our predecessors. "VVe know more of the 
world of life than was known or than was at all sur- 
mised by philosophers only three centuries ago — more 
in the proportion of many millions to one. This far- 
extended prospect can not but affect the feelings with 
which we regard the constitution of the animated world ; 
and it must bear also upon the conclusions, moral and 
theological, which may warrantably be drawn from the 
fields of natural history. 

254. The philosophic and the contemplative minds 
of former times might almost be envied some of the 
prerogatives of their ignorance as to the relative posi- 
tion of man on earth. Man — his energies, his desti- 
nies, the range of his reason, and the intensity of his 
tastes — his relish of the beautiful — these things were, 
to such minds, the world — the universe. As to the 
orders around them, " the fishes of the sea," they were 



BEEADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 107 

the servants of man — some of them ; they were his 
aliment — some of them ; or they were the decorations 
of his world ; they were the things that are moving or 
at rest upon the foreground of lordly human existence, 
or they were the objects that fill the spaces in its back- 
ground. Man was the only being of whom much ac- 
count should be taken. 

255. But it is no longer possible to us at this pres- 
ent time, or it is a possibility confined to the senti- 
mental and the poetical, to look around, in any such 
mood as this, upon the great world of life. Upon the 
broad platform of conscious existence the aristocracy 
of mind is overborne by the democracy : in the eccle- 
sia of all that live, man finds himself outvoted millions 
to one. 

256. It is after a recollection of himself — it is upon 
the ground of a new estimate of his powers, that man 
regains his position, and that he challenges anew a 
supremacy which shall never again be called in ques- 
tion. The ancient belief of the dignity of man as 
master of the world was not wrong in substance, but 
it had been formed in ignorance of the facts. The 
facts, as they are brought before us in our modern sci- 
ence, have this meaning — they confirm this estimate 
in its substance, and they give it also a vastness of 
meaning that is incalculably extended. 

257. Modern science has brought us into acquaint- 
ance with the animated world in two modes that are 
independent of each other : the first of these is that 
afforded by the revelations of the microscope. We 
should keep far within the limits of truth in affirming 
that this instrument gives us the knowledge of living 



108 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

creatures — a million for every one that may be known 
to the naked eye, and that was actually known to the 
naturalists of antiquity. The conjecture might be 
hazarded that the animals of all orders known to the 
fathers of ancient philosophy as the tenants of earth,' 
air, and water, may be outnumbered by those which 
the microscope shows to be enjoying existence in a 
gill of water from a stagnant pond. 

258. Very many of the species that are compre- 
hended in this modern revelation are found to be pos- 
sessed of a high organization, and there are but a few 
concerning which we should be in doubt as to their 
right to claim a place among those that are " put in 
trust of their individual welfare." Sensation, percep- 
tion, a central consciousness, and, pre-eminently, the 
powers of locomotion, are seen to belong to beings of 
whom as many as there w r ere men in the army of 
Xerxes might be marshaled in open order upon a 
sixpence I 

259. The vastness of that theatre of conscious life 
which the microscope opens to our view might be sym- 
bolized in various ways, as thus : We take the Earth, 
with its inhabitants, as known to antiquity — the beasts 
of the field, the fowls of heaven, the creeping things, 
and the fishes innumerable ; a multitude, indeed, be- 
yond computation ! But now we transport ourselves 
to the Sun, and we wander over those resplendent 
plains upon which no shadow falls. These fields of 
light, like the dim surface of the earth, we may sup- 
pose to be thickly peopled with the living — land, and 
water, and air are all tenanted ; but the proportion of 
the area of the sun to that of the earth does not exag- 



BEEADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 109 

gerate the numerical difference between the animal 
population known to antiquity, and that which is made 
known to ourselves by the microscope. 

260. The second of these revelations above referred 
to is that which the modern Geology has brought for- 
ward. This planetary theatre of conscious existence, 
vast as it is, we should learn to think oi first as the 
creation of to-clay ; or let us take what might be the 
average lifetime of all species, some spending their 
entire inheritance of good in the mid-hours of a single 
summer's day ; some — it is the few — are Nature's an- 
nuitants through a century. But the average lon- 
gevity of all animated orders would probably be found 
to come within the compass of a summer ; or, if the 
overwhelming numbers of the short-lived are duly con- 
sidered, the conjecture may be admitted that animal 
life runs through its course, completes its individual 
destiny, and is replaced by its successors several times 
in the circuit of each year. As to marine insects, it 
need not be supposed that their season of life is de- 
pendent upon the alternation of summer and winter ; 
and as to the terrestrial orders of the temperate zones, 
Earth has its months of life on each side of its equator, 
and within the tropics there is no cessation. 

261. But throughout what cycles of time is it that 
this planet has thus continued to renew, from year to 
year, its tenantry ? No answer can be given to such 
a question ; and yet, unless our modern Geology has 
altogether failed to interpret its data, it is true that 
years, beyond all power of computation, have run on, 
giving life to new ranks of beings, and these in each 
class innumerable. 



110 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

262. Unless, therefore, our modern Geology has 
altogether misread the book, the leaves of which it 
has so lately opened, it is certain that, through a lapse 
of ages in comparison with which the period of the 
human family upon earth is but an hour, this Earth 
has yielded itself to the support of animal felicity with 
incalculable copiousness. Conscious existence — one, 
as its intention, and varying very little in its primary 
elements, although infinitely diversified in its exterior 
and its structure — has spread itself as a deluge over 
all lands, and has filled the volume of the deep. 

263. Putting out of view just now these last brief 
years of human history, it may be asked, For what pur- 
pose has this planet sped its way through space from 
the morning-time of the creation — from the era of the 
fossiliferous rocks ? Not, we may be sure, to clothe 
itself in mosses, not to deck itself with ferns, and to 
tuft itself with palms, but rather to nourish the con- 
sciousness of good. 

264. During the lapse of planetary time stupendous 
catastrophes have once and again swept over the sur- 
face of the globe, in whole or in part, and animal life 
has often gone down, with its countless millions, into 
the abyss ; yet it has ever and again reappeared ; the 
waste has been made up, the desolated places have 
been occupied — they have been crowded anew ; and 
again, through millions of years, ardent suns, rising 
and setting over a fertile world, have seen earth, and 
air, and seas quite full of life — a world throughout 
which Mind has wrought its purposes in ten thousand 
different roads, but always effectively, and with great 
success, in quest of its well-being. 



BREADTH OF THE WOELD OF MIND. Ill 

265. We should accustom ourselves to look abroad 
upon the field of animal life away from that point of 
view from which it is seen only in contrast with the 
more highly-developed faculties of the human species. 
Instead of thinking of it under any such disadvanta- 
geous comparison, let us sometimes think of it in its 
absolute quality, or such as it is, and such as it would 
seem to be if we could take a position far out of sight 
of humanity. 

266. If in this manner we may succeed in breaking 
in upon our habits of thought, and in forming an esti- 
mate of the wider world of life, unprejudiced by any 
comparison, we may be led to believe that the pre- 
rogatives of the lower orders of animal existence are 
of a kind which even humanity might be tempted to 
think enviable. What, then, are these prerogatives ? 

267. The correspondence of organized beings with 
the material world takes place through five, six, seven, 
or more channels. It is true that there are orders that 
seem to be confined to one or two only of these inlets 
of knowledge, but then there are some — those of the 
insect class especially — that indicate perceptions such 
as the larger animals and man have no consciousness 
of. As to the five senses, several of the larger animals 
possess them in a degree of acuteness which we can 
scarcely conceive of. Yet it is not on the ground of 
these more acute powers of sensation in relation to the 
Outer world that the prerogatives of the inferior orders 
should be affirmed to surpass, very greatly, those of 
the human species. 

268. Nevertheless, while this subject of the sensorial 
organization is before us, a fact suggestive of an im- 



112 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

portant inferenee may properly Ibe noticed. Amid 
those endless diversities in the modes of existence 
which display themselves throughout the animated 
world — differences the most extreme in structure, and 
in function, and in form — there prevails almost an 
unvaried sameness Loth as to the objects of sensation 
and as to the organization which is its medium. Mind 
touches upon or converses with the material world in 
respect of light, sound — the two classes of (as they 
may be called) chemical properties, namely, those ad- 
dressed to the organs of smell and taste — and as to 
solid extension and the vis inertice of masses, as well 
as one or more properties that are obscurely indicated 
in the instincts of some insect orders. Diversity be- 
longs to the exterior of animal life, but at every step 
of our advance toward the interior more and more of 
sameness prevails. 

269. The inference that is suggested by these facts 
is this: that Mind is a uniform principle; that it is 
one element ; and that, in its relation to the material 
world, its points of contact can be only few. 

270. The animal force, as related to the size and to 
the mass of the body in each species, is far from being 
in direct proportion to either. As a more general rule, 
the animal force, as related to the mass, is inversely 
as the size of the animal. To this rule there are many 
exceptions ; but it so far prevails as this, that in the 
insect orders, and in some of the infusoria, the loco- 
motive power superabounds in a ratio that is incalcu- 
lably great. 

271. Moreover, in many instances among the di- 
minutive and the microscopic species, the locomotive 



BREADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 113 

velocity surpasses very greatly the apparent sufficiency 
of the mechanical apparatus by means of which it is 
effected. This apparent excess in the effect, as re- 
lated to the (mechanical) means or cause, might per- 
haps he alleged to have some place in the instance of 
the swifter birds ; yet in a still more distinct manner 
does it present itself in some insects, and in those 
microscopic swimmers and skaters in the organization 
of which it is very difficult to detect any adequate 
means for effecting the incalculable speed of their in- 
cessant movements. 

272. It may be left as an open question in the de- 
partment of animal physiology whether, in the instances 
that are now referred to, that rudimental energy which 
is the distinguishing property of Mind comes to bear 
mediately or immediately upon the vis inertice of 
matter and upon the weight of the body. There may, 
for example, be room for the conjecture that the rudi- 
mental animal energy being, in all orders, a constant 
quantity, or nearly so, when it is lodged in a body 
the mass and weight of which are almost infinitely 
small, this power superabounds to a prodigious extent 
in relation to the work it has to do, so that the voli- 
tions of the animal carry it with electric speed in all 
directions. 

273. Leaving a surmise of this sort to be ascertained 
or rejected, the unquestionable fact stands in our view, 
unaffected by any such conjecture, that a locomotive 
and a muscular force is enjoyed by some of the vola- 
tile insect orders, which, if it had been conferred in 
the same proportion upon the lion and the elephant, 
would have made them indeed the tyrants of creation. 



114 THE WOELD OP MIND. 

The eagle, if gifted proportiondbly with the wing- 
power of the dragon-fly, would be free of all continents 
— would range the planet at large, and would prevent 
the morning, perching in one hour upon the Andes, 
and in the next upon the Himalaya. 

274. As to the consciousness of the animal when 
in the exercise of its locomotive and muscular force, 
no account is taken of the mechanical means through 
which the effect is produced. "Whether the volition 
realizes itself in the way which we are wont to imagine 
when we think of the movements of celestial beings, 
or whether the machinery of wings and limbs, of bones, 
muscles, nerves, be all, it is the same to the antelope, 
to the swallow, to the fly, and to the hungry atom 
which darts from side to side of a drop of water in 
quest of its prey. 

275. On this ground we must be quite safe while 
we interpret animal consciousness at large by the anal- 
ogy of our own consciousness ; and in doing so, we 
may look back to that bright season of early life — say 
from the twelfth year onward toward manhood — which 
is especially the season of muscular sport, and through- 
out which the force of the body is, more or less so, 
much in excess of the demands that are made upon it 
by the exigencies of life. During this gay gymnastic 
era, and, indeed, long beyond it, among those who are 
exempt from toil, the mere consciousness of animal en- 
ergy, and the free exercise of it within the limits of 
fatigue, is pleasurable in a very high degree : it is an- 
imal good of an intense kind. 

276. Grant it — which we may grant — that, in the 
more complicated structure of human nature, the rudi- 



BREADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 115 

mental or organic enjoyment of movement and sport 
soon surrounds itself with various incidental pleasura- 
ble emotions, which enhance it very much, yet there 
is here as;ain a balance in favor of the animal orders 
around us ; for with many of these the powers of loco- 
motion, if we estimate them in relation to the size and 
weight of the animal, are immeasurably greater than 
they are in man. These powers are also far more per- 
sistent; that is to say, the exercise of them does not 
so soon induce exhaustion and bring on the sense of 
fatigue. In truth, it may be doubted if, either in the 
instinctive movements of animals while in pursuit of 
their welfare or in their purposeless gambols, that col- 
lapse of the muscular energy which so soon brings it 
to its end is ever experienced. 

277. Those indeed must be stern philosophers who 
can watch the gambols of the young of animals, and, 
refusing to interpret them by the aid of analogy, would 
ask direct proof of the assumption that these coursings 
and jumpings, these purposeless circuits, and these 
races to no end, are pleasurable. We take it for cer- 
tain that they are so ; and then we may look abroad 
upon the great theatre of animal existence — upon earth, 
air, and water, and admit the belief that the outgoings 
of the locomotive energy is the staple of animal enjoy- 
ment ; that it is a good which, if it be less intense, is 
yet of much greater amplitude than that attending upon 
the satiating of appetites. To satisfy hunger is to as- 
suage a pain ; not so to sweep the cool and bright 
morning skies with wings that do not tire. 

278. If to man labor has its pleasures, or, rather, 
its satisfactions, this pleasure comes in only as a com- 



116 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

pensation, alleviating, more or less, the pains of toil. 
Human labor may indeed be cheerfully borne, and it 
is so by the young and robust ; but labor exacted by 
want, near at hand or remote, is undergone because it 
is the less of two evils. 

279. It is not so with the animal orders. We must 
here note a difference which gives great meaning to the 
comparison that is just now in our view. The labors 
of animals — such as those of the bee, or of the beaver, 
or of the bird in nidiflcation, or of the ant in the care 
of its young, or of the silk -worm, or of the spider — 
these various constructive labors might be brought un- 
der two designations, for they are the products either 
of what we might call fixed reason or of free reason. 
The difference seems to be real. 

280. Insect architecture, as that of the bee and the 
wasp, and we might include the nidificative skill of 
some birds, conforms itself invariably to the principles 
of the very highest reason ; but it is fixed reason : the 
rule of the work has been stereotyped in the animal 
mind, and the creature seems to be a tool only in the 
hand of an occult intelligence. But there are many 
orders of animals whose agency in pursuit of their ob- 
ject consists in a variable appliance of individual skill 
and address to the varying exigencies of the moment. 
There is much of this sort of free or versatile reason 
in the wiles of all carnivorous animals : there is a de- 
cisive display of it in the labors and the social toils of 
the ant, and not less so in the devices of the rat, one 
of the most knowing of creatures. As to domesticated 
animals, with them, for the most part, the fixed reason 
has quite given place to the free, and thus it is that 



BEEADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 117 

the shepherd's or the sportsman's dog listens as intel- 
ligently as the drover's boy to the shrill verbal admo- 
nition, "Look sharp, there!" when the "bewildered 
flock are hurrying through a town. 

281. But the difference that should be noticed is 
this — that in all those animal labors which are achieved 
in conformity with what we have called fixed reason, 
there appears to be an established or stable equilibrium 
in the animal structure between the work that is to be 
done and the force which is to do it. The force is al- 
ways as the labor ; it is an equation that is constant 
and involuntary ; so that no sense of fatigue, no effort, 
no determination of will, attends this species of work ; 
there is no exhaustion or waste consequent upon an 
incidental excess of the task beyond the strength of 
the animal. 

282. An inference of a very different kind is sug- 
gested when we watch any of those labors, construct- 
ive, predatory, or defensive, which come under the sec- 
ond of these designations, and which are of the nature 
of appliances fitting the circumstances of the moment. 
In any operations of this latter sort, induced by an oc- 
current object, and conformed to its specialities, the 
signs of fatigue and exhaustion soon make their ap- 
pearance: the animal slackens, pants, abandons his 
purpose, or resigns himself to his fate. Nature has, 
indeed, bestowed upon him a very large amount of 
muscular force, but it is not, as it is in the other case, 
a definite quantity, measured against a task which is 
also definite. 

283. Here, then, a prerogative of animal existence 
throughout the lower orders presents itself, Human 



118 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

labor, to the whole extent of it, is a task that draws 
upon the stock of strength ; it is a task which, from 
its commencement, is producing exhaustion, and which 
must come to its end in a collapse of mind and body. 

284. In this species of exhaustive labor the animal 
orders participate to some extent, yet (if domestic 
animals are excepted) it is under conditions that are 
far less severe. But to a much greater extent these 
orders sustain no such burden ; for, as to these car- 
penters, these masons, these joiners, and weavers, and 
spinners, they plod on, from early to late, unconscious 
of weariness : they cease to labor, but they do not 
then throw themselves, as if worn, upon their beds. 

285. We may now fancy ourselves in the heart of 
that wilderness of life through which the Amazon rolls 
its volumes. Life upon this broad surface develops 
itself in all its power : the humid heat, the rampant 
growth of gigantic plants and trees, the crowding of 
all species, feeding upon never-exhausted stores, and 
in their turn devoured — all things favor the replenish- 
ment of this region with animation to the utmost ex- 
tent that may be possible. What is aimed at in this 
commonwealth, and what is accomplished, is indeed 
"the greatest good of the greatest number." 

286. But as to these millions, many as they may 
be, each individual of them is required, from sunrise 
to sunset, or perhaps from sunset to sunrise, to look 
to himself, and to acquit himself well as the guardian 
of his particular life and happiness. Who, then, shall 
calculate the prodigious amount of labor that is sum- 
med up in this round of daily work ? In this region 
there is often great noise; there is chattering, and 



BEEADTH OF THE WOULD OF MIND. 119 

chirping, and screaming, and wrangling ; Tbut as to the 
work that is done, it goes on silently ; and not only 
silently, Tbut without inflicting any suffering upon the 
work-people : the twang of the driver's lash is not 
heard in all this populous district. Works admirably 
finished are turned out here ; but no brows are be- 
dewed with sweat, no tears are shed upon unrequited 
toil : the bread that is eaten is not the bread , of sor- 
rows. The labor could not have been more ' easily 
performed even if spirits from an upper world had 
come down to it. 

287. We are treading upon ground far more firm 
than that of a happy and benevolent conjecture when, 
bringing ourselves into position for looking down upon 
(let it be) a tropical continent replete with animal life, 
full of innumerable species, we think of it in this single 
aspect as a vast place of work where labor is not toil ; 
where there are no task-masters ; where there is no 
controversy between wage and capital ; where life and 
its costs are always an equation ; where existence is 
no burden, and where it pays no tax except the final 
penalty, the poll-tax that is levied upon all that 
breathe. 

288. A tropical wilderness is, however, not merely 
a great workshop, but it is a theatre of gorgeous deco- 
ration ; and here, although it is not so among our- 
selves, the work-people are all, and always, well dress- 
ed. Just now we have affirmed that animal labor is 
not a drudgery ; and thus, and as if it were to attest 
the fact, and as if Nature would wish us so to inter- 
pret her dealings with her household, so it is that 
these laborers are never to be seen otherwise than in 



120 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

holiday trim. Throughout Nature's own industrial 
districts, the work that must be done is effected by 
those who (as to many of them) are attired like princes ; 
they are decked like the grandees of an Eastern pres- 
ence-chamber. 

289. But to what end is all this embellishment? 
Why is there so much gold and jewelry ? Why so 
much wearing of plumes ? Why are the colors of the 
rainbow sprinkled, and spotted, and figured upon these 
mantles and coiffures ? Why is each guild so sump- 
tuously emblazoned with the symbols of its ancestral 
glories ? These are questions which force themselves 
upon the contemplative man who paces his garden in 
a summer's morning, and they admit of more than a 
merely conjectural answer. 

290. But in seeking for an answer we need not 
travel so far as to a wilderness of the torrid zone. 
We may find it in the hedge-row nearest our cottage 
gate. 

291. Every step of that advance which modern sci- 
ence has made, and which it is daily making, confirms 
our faith in the principle that, in the economy of the 
material world — and we are now thinking of the sys- 
tems of vegetable and animal organization — there is 
absolutely nothing superfluous, nothing which has no 
purpose. There is nothing included either in the struc- 
ture or in the functions of plants or animals which 
does not fulfill an intention. In certain instances we 
fail to divine the end or reason ; but in these exceptive 
cases, what is unknown, or what is not interpretable, 
still bears upon its front the easily-recognized charac- 
teristics of order and reason ; and we freely admit the 



BREADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 121 

saving inference that, although human science has here 
something to learn, Nature's work is neither incom- 
plete nor redundant. 

292. Vegetable and animal organization in all spe- 
cies is copiously decorated. In some, and in many 
species, this decoration is gorgeous ; it is more than 
simply elegant — it is regal, both as to its contours and 
its colors, and in the polish and the finish of its sur- 
faces. This broad fact is, in truth, the broadest of all 
the facts which offer themselves to the eye of man 
when he looks about him in field or forest. 

293. But the analyst will ask, What is decoration ? 
Is it a reality in nature, or is it only an aspect of 
things which owes its origin entirely to the human 
mind ? So far as this there can be no question, 
namely, that the forms, the figurings, the tracery, and 
the polish of surfaces, and the coloring in patterns — 
these things are real ; the only question there can be 
room for is this, Whether that ornamental meaning or 
value which we assign to them is also real, or whether 
it be factitious ? whether, as decorative, it has a place 
in the purposes of Nature, or is only an illusion con- 
stant and natural to man ? 

294. If we were to take up this latter supposition, 
then the entire class of facts, attaching in different de- 
grees to all orders of beings, vegetable and animal, re- 
mains to be accounted for. If, in itself, decoration is 
nothing, then what is the purpose of those forms and 
colors which we think to be ornament ? The longer 
we look at any elaborately-ornamented species, the 
less inclined shall we be to surrender our instinctive 
feeling that ornament is ornament; that gay colors 

F 



122 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

are gay ; that fine enameling is fine ; in a word, that 
beauty of all kinds is beautiful. 

295. But if we assent to this bold and yet reason- 
able conclusion, then a second question demands some 
kind of answer. For whom, or for whose eye, does 
Nature thus richly deck her children ? In respect of 
whom does the organized world, as to ■ its exterior, 
show so much art, which is more than the mere ma- 
chine demands ? For what purpose, or for whose en- 
tertainment is it that, while the interior machinery of 
life, vegetative and animal, is left to be arranged and 
finished under the direction of mere reason, the exte- 
rior — the visible adjustments, obey quite another law ? 
Why is that which we call decoration always placed 
where it comes within the reach of eyes ? 

296. We may say that ornament — beauty of form 
and color, are good in the eye of the Creator. This 
must always be true ; but the answer does not meet 
the question; for that which is good to the Creative 
Mind is good in respect of some purpose included in 
the creative plan, and which we have yet to look for. 

297. Dare we say that the decorative element, at- 
taching as it does, and as it has ever attached, to or- 
ders far remote from human curiosity, has no other 
purpose than that of attracting the listless admiration 
of man ? How can we imagine this ? Man has walk- 
ed the earth only during these last few days of planet- 
ary time. Creations, each of them gay and fair as 
this, have had their times, and have passed away al- 
most an eternity gone by. 

298. But shall we entertain the conjecture that the 
beauty of the world \a for the recreation of celestial 



BEEADTH OF THE WOELD OF MIND. 123 

visitants ? This, or any other surmise equally gratu- 
itous and fanciful, may amuse an hour of reverie, but 
in this place we are in search of reasons or supposi- 
tions which may stand good on grounds of some posi- 
tive evidence. 

299. There is a practicable path open before us on 
this ground. If the question be put in its most com- 
prehensive terms, Whether the animal Mind be sus- 
ceptible, like the human Mind, of pleasurable emotions 
of a more refined or intellectual sort than are those 
which attend the satiating of appetites, then we find a 
conclusive answer to such a question in the sweet mel- 
odies of the woods. It does not seem possible to be 
skeptical in relation either to these facts or as to the 
inference which Ave draw from them. The singing of 
birds, grateful as it is to the human ear, is it not in- 
tensely grateful to the ear to which it is actually ad- 
dressed ? Few would be so stern in their logical ex- 
actions as to demand any further proof in support of 
this inference than that which commands our assent 
when we listen, in the lone woods at night, to the swell- 
ing music of the nightingale. Is not the male bird 
conscious of the excellence of his own performance ? 
and does not his mate confess the charm ? 

300. Our inferences, then, are of this sort : the woods 
in May and June resound with melodies : this is fact ; 
it is not surmise ; and there are ears to listen to these 
notes : this is fact also. We infer — if the inference be 
not too bold — that there is a pleasurable sense in the 
animal Mind quite analogous to that which belongs to 
the human Mind. The animal Mind is not merely 
animal or brute ; it has its intellectuality, and it has 



124 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

its emotions of pleasure (intense, probably, as they are 
simple) derived from sources of a higher range than 
those which bear upon the animal preservation.. 

301. But is the animal Mind conscious also, and 
pleasurably conscious, of beauty in form and color ? 
To reach a probable answer to this question, we place 
some unquestioned facts in view, as before. The veg- 
etable world, over and above its necessary organiza- 
tion, or its mere machinery of life, growth, and fructi- 
fication, is richly decorated ; its contours and its col- 
oring; are thrown over its structure and its functions 
of life — of reproduction and of fructification. In like 
manner, as we have just now said, decoration, as well 
in forms as in colors, is a constant fact in the animal 
world. But if so, for what purpose ? 

302. We must here, for a moment, commit ourselves 
to a strong inference, resting on the ground of analogy. 
Facts carry us some way, yet they are not absolutely 
conclusive. Thus far they sustain our supposition : 
certain orders become conscious of the decorations that 
are bestowed upon them by man. It is so with the 
horse and the elephant, unquestionably. But is not 
the peacock, as he unfurls his splendors to the admir- 
ing sun, is he not vividly conscious of his own magnif- 
icence ? We can not watch his movements and doubt 
it : his eyes, advantageously mounted in his versatile 
head, have a constant prospect of this emblazoned fan ; 
it is always in his view ; and the creature struts and 
turns as if he would court other eyes to be fixed upon 
it too. 

303. Less distinct, perhaps, may be the indications 
of the same kind which we should gather from a spec- 



BREADTH OP THE WORLD OF MIND. 125 

tacle that is not less attractive. In the noon-hour of 
the summer's day we stop, as if doubtful whether we 
should take so great a liberty, to gaze upon the " Red 
Admiral" butterfly (Vanessa Atalanta), which perches 
on the brim of the gayest flower in the garden. The 
wings, not then in use for flight, yet are not folded or 
brought together, but are held erect and apart, and they 
show a twitting motion, as if to give the utmost ad- 
vantage to the rays that fall upon the downy surface. 
The creature's eyes are so planted that, while the calyx 
of the flower is before it, the field of its vision is chief- 
ly filled with its own outstretched beauties. Child of 
an hour ! in its structure it symbolizes the thoughtless 
felicity of its own lot. The past troubles it not ; the 
figured velvet of its wings is its only retrospection ; 
and the only future in its thought is the honey -pot at 
its feet. 

304. Without doing violence to any rules of scien- 
tific logic, we may either accept or reject the hypothe- 
sis which is now before us. If we reject it, then the 
exterior of the organized world, throughout the vege- 
table and animal orders, presents a problem that can 
find no solution. Why are fruits and flowers, why are 
birds, butterflies, and shells, and all things else, deco- 
rated ? Why do we not find them to be simple ma- 
chineries, quite as sufficient in relation to their destined 
purposes without a decorated exterior as they can be 
with it. The decoration is indeed no encumbrance to 
the machine, but then it has no assignable purpose ; 
and yet, in all things else, Nature does nothing without 
a purpose. 

305. If we accept this hypothesis, then at once the 



126 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

sense of fitness is satisfied, and it is much more than 
satisfied. With how rich and copious a conscious- 
ness of benevolent intention do we now enter the 
great theatre of the animated world ! On all sides 
there is gayety, beauty, simple elegance, and gorgeous 
magnificence. Nor has this theatre been thus fitted 
up in vain. It has its sweet melodies, its incense, 
and its perfumes ; it has its forms of grace, and its 
endless commixtures of bright colors ; and there are 
eyes every where to gaze upon it ; and, moreover, 
within the Mind-cell of these myriads of beings there 
is (so we now assume) a vivid consciousness of what- 
ever is thus invested with any pleasure-giving prop- 
erty. 

306. In the human mind every source of enjoyment 
combines itself quickly with various mixed senti- 
ments ; and in proportion as it thus complicates itself, 
it often becomes less intense. Nor do the pleasures 
of taste fail to meet many abatements, derived from 
distastes, or from sources of sadness or melancholy. 
But it may be easily believed that those rudiment al 
pleasures that are allotted to the lower animal mind, 
if they lack expansion and elevation, yet have a com- 
pensation in their pure and undisturbed intensity. 
This supposition we accept as on every ground prob- 
able ; and, in accepting it, we may think ourselves free 
to entertain the tranquilizing belief that the beauty of 
the visible world is a beauty of which there is a per- 
petual fruition in the consciousness of all that live — 
some, perhaps, in a low degree, and some to such an 
extent as well to justify what we might call the lavish 
ornamentation of the world of organized beings. 



BREADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 127 

307. The same rudimental intensity manifestly at- 
taches to those instincts and feelings in the animal 
system which correspond to the more refined emotions 
of the social sentiment in man. What we need not 
scruple to call the conjugal affection and the passion- 
ate parental fondness — an heroic care of offspring — 
these elements of animal life give such evidence of 
their presence and their power as admit of no doubt. 

308. These semi-moral affections, which so often 
touch upon the very borders of the moral economy, 
and which, as one might say, trench upon the ground 
of generous and tender human affections, and which 
can not be contemplated by ourselves without emo- 
tion — these affections — these conjugal and parental 
fervors, are nevertheless confined within such limits as 
secure them against those sad and often agonizing re- 
vulsions that draw rivers of tears from human suffer- 
ers. The semi-moral affections of the animal orders 
around us are short-dated ; they abide in their energy 
for a season only ; they leave no traces where they 
have prevailed with the utmost force. These feelings 
of one class do not complicate themselves with feel- 
ings of another class ; there is no evidence to that ef- 
fect, or that they consolidate themselves upon the in- 
dividual mind so as to constitute individual character. 
If, therefore, they fall far short of the elevation, and 
compass, and dignity of the analogous human affec- 
tions, they are altogether exempted from that large 
counterweight of sorrow and suffering under the press- 
ure of which the heart of man is so often crushed. 

309. As to each of the constituents of animal well- 
being, this general affirmation has a place: It is a 



128 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

good, enjoyed to the utmost extent which may consist 
with a perfectly secure exemption from those counter- 
active sufferings that affect the mind much rather than 
the body. 

310. Hence it is that the happiness of the animal 
orders (if we can allow this word to Tbe applied to the 
well-being of any beneath ourselves) — this happiness 
must be set forth under its negative aspect : after we 
have thought of it as good in an absolute sense, we 
must think of it also as good in the sense of an ex- 
emption from the ills that attach to a higher order of 
well-being, that is, the human. 

311. We may bring forward any one of the more 
highly-developed animal species, and ask, What more 
could have been done for this living structure ? What 
gift, additional to its actual endowments, could have 
been conferred upon it, only stopping short of those 
gifts, intellectual and moral, the possession ot which 
involves the risk of loss or damage as to what is al- 
ready possessed? It will not be easy — we should 
rather say it will not be possible to name or to imag- 
ine any such bestowment. In seeking for a boon that 
might safely have been bestowed upon the lower or- 
ders, we must look among the prerogatives of human 
nature ; and as to each of those which are the distinc- 
tion of man, each has fully shown its perilous quality. 

312. Animal happiness — let the word pass at this 
time — animal happiness, taxed as it is with the liabil- 
ity to momentary organic pain, the pangs of death in- 
cluded, is taxed in no other way. We may certain- 
ly affirm this, because a liability to suffer in any other, 
and, as it may be called, higher mode, could not exist 



BEEADTH OF THE WORLD OF MIND. 129 

except as the consequence of the possession of higher 
faculties, which would give evidence of their presence 
in the actions and habits of the animal. 

313. By the rule that there is nothing in the con- 
stitution of man which has not been dimly symbolized 
in the structure of the lower animal orders, we may 
grant to some of the domesticated animals — to the dog, 
the horse, the elephant — a shadowy sensibility to moral 
sentiments — a consciousness of good and of its contra- 
ry, just enough to bring them within the penumbra of 
the moral system. But this is the utmost that can be 
alleged on this ground ; and, therefore, it is safe to af- 
firm concerning these countless millions of conscious 
beings that to them the field of their existence is an 
Eden : they sport their day, unknowing as to evil ; 
they are exempt from dark surmisings, from gloomy 
forebodings, from terrors of the imagination, from heart- 
achings, from remorses, from jealousy, from harbored 
malice, from the torments of baffled ambition, from the 
sense of humiliation ; they know nothing of the gan- 
grene of pride ; they sustain not the listless conscious- 
ness of life without a purpose, or the weary sense of 
life overweighted with labor and care. 

314. To the animal orders, the future, in its forms 
either of hope or of fear, has no existence ; to them 
the forecasting of the future is a germ only, serving to 
vitalize certain conservative instincts. Nor can the 
past be more than a residual fragmentary element, 
mingling itself, without product, with the conscious- 
ness of the present moment. 

315. Such as these, then, so far as probable con- 
jecture, following the indications of palpable facts, 

F2 



130 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

may lead us — such as these are the conditions under 
which life, with its faculties of enjoyment, has Tbeen 
granted to innumerable species, through countless cy- 
cles of duration. This, or nearly such, for we can not 
here greatly err, is that idea of good which gives law 
to the creation. A higher idea, and we must admit it 
to be higher, namely, that of intellectual development 
and a moral system, is the rare and the recent except- 
ive instance. 

316. Leaving, then, this exceptive instance to be 
considered on other grounds, and to be brought within 
range of principles which physical science can never 
supply, we are free — and, perhaps, we may do so in a 
more ample and distinct manner than heretofore — to 
rest upon the tranquil conception of a scheme of exist- 
ence, the length and breadth, the height and depth of 
which surpass all powers of thought, but throughout 
which GOOD prevails ; upon which evil makes no in- 
road, and upon which organic pain glances only for an 
instant. 

317. With such a scheme neighboring upon us, it 
can not be well to leave it out of our account when 
our purpose is to explore the world of Mind. 

Note. — Comparative Physiology, in its present state of advance- 
ment and expansion, is rich in instances confirming and illustrating, 
what has been advanced in this section. A volume would soon be 
filled with such illustrations ; but to adduce them in this place would 
too long interrupt our pursuit of that which more directly belongs to 
the purpose of this elementary book. In a supplementary section, 
some facts gathered from this field, and which are peculiarly signifi- 
cant in relation to our subject, will be brought together. 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 131 



X. 

RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 

318. In any case when we are in search of what we 
believe to be rudiraental in the constitution of things, 
two courses are before us. The first of these mio;ht 
be called the chronological path ; for instance, we may- 
seek for that which gives the earliest indication of its 
presence among the several constituents that are in 
question. The second path is that of analysis ; and 
the result we are seeking for will be that one element 
which, in the most absolute manner, defies our endeav- 
ors to give expression to it in descriptive terms, or to 
speak of it otherwise than by substituting one name 
for it instead of another. 

319. Taking, then, the first -named of these two 
courses, we ask, Among those elements that are as- 
sumed to be the distinguishing characteristics of ani- 
mal life as compared with vegetable life, which of them 
is the earliest dated ? In seeking an answer, we should 
be careful to avoid whatever belongs to animal physi- 
ology, and, therefore, we leave to the physiologist the 
history of the embryo ; but this fact we are entitled to 
receive from him — a fact which he must leave just as 
he finds it, unexplained — namely, the manifestation of 
individual life in the embryo long before the animal 
has conversed with the outer world by the eye, or the 
ear, or other senses. 

320. Very properly, we decline to enter upon a sub- 



132 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

ject so occult as this, but yet it may be affirmed that 
muscular movement, differing essentially from any 
movements that are observable in the vegetable world, 
precedes sensation, unless it be some undefined' con- 
sciousness that is earlier dated than parturition. 

321. In this way, the animal, before its entrance 
upon the world, declares itself to live, and it lays claim 
to its individuality long before it has concerned itself 
with the things of the Avorld. This, then, is the reply 
to our inquiry as to the first rudiment of mind, if we 
seek it on the chronological path. 

322. The result is the same if we pursue inquiry 
on the path of analysis. Sensation is composite ; it 
is the product of two or more forces from without, act- 
ing upon an organization that is complicated in its 
structure. There are five, six, or more kinds of sen- 
sation; and when these are compared — any one of 
them with any other, or when, in turn, we compare 
one with all the others— we find room for distinctions 
and for descriptive statements. In sensation more is 
implied than a simple and single rudiment. Certain- 
ly there is more than there is in that which we are in- 
tending to name as indeed the first rudiment of mind, 
namely, Power or Force, as related to the masses of 
the material world. 

323. Again we refrain from that which belongs to 
animal physiology, and, therefore, make no inquiry con- 
cerning a nervous system, or that muscular apparatus 
through which animal movement is effected. Mind 
has no consciousness of nerves or of muscles: volition 
is a purely rudimental fact, having respect to nothing 
but the mental intention which is realized at the in- 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 133 

stant when it takes place ; how realized the mind nei- 
ther knows nor cares, but the physiologist may dis- 
cover if he can. 

324. At this point there stands before us an in- 
stance very proper for showing the independence and 
the separate departments of mental science and ani- 
mal physiology. When the physiologist has told us 
every thing that he knows concerning those sensations 
which give rise to the volition, and then concerning 
the conveyance of these, by one set of nerves, to the 
sensorium, and then the conveyance of — he knows not 
what— by another system of nerves, to the muscles 
(the extensors, or deflectors, or any others), and then 
the contractile irritability of these muscles, and then 
the pull upon the bony leverage — when we have learn- 
ed all these particulars, or any others, there remains a 
connecting fact to be sought for, which, if we fail to 
find it, must be reserved as forming the inscrutable 
link between Mind and Matter ; it is that, the reality 
of which we may confidently assume, but concerning 
which we can know nothing beyond the fact of its re- 
ality. 

325. On the one side there is Thought; or we 
may call it, as we please, volition, or intention, or any 
thing else. On this ground, the choice of words can 
neither help us much nor hinder us much. On one 
side there is Thought, or Mind in Act ; on the other 
side there is motion, taking place in a mass, larger or 
smaller, heavier or lighter. The intervening apparatus 
we are unconscious of — we are quite mindless in re- 
gard to it : it is to the Mind as if it were not. 

326. We occupy nearly the same position as to the 



134 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

organs of sensation. We know nothing of the eye or 
the ear unless we choose to give attention to them ; nor 
do we know any thing of the connection between the 
organ of sensation and the Mind. Up to this present 
moment no progress whatever has been made, either 
on the side of physiology or on the side of mental phi- 
losophy, in stepping across the interval "between Mind 
and Matter. If the time should come when this in- 
veterate mystery may be spoken of as cleared up, two 
sciences must then be melted into one ; but until then 
they must be treated apart, and each in its own 
manner. 

327. The word Thought usually carries with it 
several constituent ideas, of which hereafter we are to 
speak ; in place, therefore, of this word just now, we 
say, Mind in Act toward matter is the earliest, and 
it is the most rudimental of those characteristics which 
distinguish animal life from vegetable life. 

328. When the individual consciousness has be- 
come developed to some extent, as we shall see pres- 
ently, mind begins to act upon itself; but before this 
development has taken place, it acts upon matter in 
the mass. There is, however, room for the question 
whether it does not, in some occult manner, act also 
upon the animal organization chemically, or otherwise 
than by volition. It may do so, and there is reason 
to think that it does ; but this kind of agency, because 
it is involuntary, and is unconsciously carried on, be- 
longs rather to physiology than to the science of 
Mind. 

329. The intensity of the Mind-force, differing as 
it does, by so many degrees, in different orders of an- 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 135 

imals, has already been spoken of (272, et seq.). The 
subject, highly curious and significant as it is, could 
not be entered upon to any good purpose apart from 
its relationship to animal physiology. A word only 
can be here admitted indicative of the course which 
such an inquiry might pursue. 

330. It might first be inquired, What are the limits 
of the Force of animal volition as related to matter in 
the mass, or to gravitation, or to the resistance of the 
medium — air or water — or to the tenacity of solids ? 
These limits seem to be of the same kind as those 
which set a boundary to all mechanical appliances, 
namely, the strength of the materials which we must 
employ. It is so with steam-power, and it is so with 
the hydraulic press. Give what thickness we may to 
cylinders — to boilers, to tubes — yet iron, and copper, 
and brass will yield to these forces sooner or later. 
The question as to the limits of animal Mind-force 
passes over, in like manner, into the department of 
physiological problems relating to the tenacity of the 
tendinous cords, the strength of the fibrous structure 
of muscles, and the lever-power of the bony tubes 
which are the fulcra. The animal mind acquires, un- 
consciously, a perception of the limits within which it 
should confine its intrinsic energy. But this pruden- 
tial consciousness of its organization is lost sight of in 
cases of extraordinary excitement or of peril of life, 
and also in moments of phrensy or delirium. Under 
some of these abnormal conditions, the animal force 
shows itself to be five or ten to one greater than its 
ordinary amount. 

331. An approximate estimate of the intrinsic force 



136 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

of the animal mind might be obtained by considering 
the locomotive speed of any animal as affording an in- 
dication of what it is in itself. Thus, if the extreme 
length of the animal from tip to tail, or the extreme 
length from tip to tip of the wings, be taken as an in- 
teger of space, then it may be asked as to each spe- 
cies, How many times in a second does the animal re- 
peat its length when he is moving at his utmost speed? 
A race-horse does this, perhaps, ten times ; a grey- 
hound fifteen times ; some insects — crawlers — thirty, 
fifty times. Swimmers and skaters — fish and some 
insects — several hundred times ; the speed of some of 
the infusoria is in a vastly higher proportion as related 
to their size. 

332. A general inference derived from facts of this 
kind would, as we have already said, support the con- 
jecture that that intrinsic force, of which the locomo- 
tive speed of an animal is the exponent, is not directly 
as his size, but inversely so. This supposition would 
imply, as a general principle, that it is almost uniform 
intrinsically, or that the germ which is allotted to dif- 
ferent orders and species differs much less than in the 
ratio of their comparative dimensions. 

333. It more nearly concerns our present purpose 
to give the clearest possible expression to what we 
mean when we allege in behalf of this intrinsic Power 
an initiative prerogative, which we assume to be the 
prime characteristic of Mind and its Fiest Rudiment. 
But, to give all the distinctness that is attainable to 
such a statement, Ave must go in quest of another rudi- 
ment, and we shall then see how the two come to a 
bearing one upon the other, and thence we may learn 
something more concernino* each. 



EUDIMENTS OF MIND. 137 

334. Although, as we have said, we know nothing 
of elements in themselves or by themselves, we may 
know much concerning them in observing how they 
work when in combination. The Physical Sciences 
are occupied exclusively with these relationships of 
elements or of forces, not at all with the elements 
themselves. It is no wonder, therefore, if the same be 
true as to Mental Philosophy : its primary facts, like 
those of the material world, are impenetrable mys- 
teries ; its secondary facts are what we have to do 
with, and these are intelligible. 

335. We have said (55 and 243) that because Mind 
takes a bearing upon Matter, Mind and Matter are two 
natures, not one. And then, what is parallel to this, 
that because Matter takes a bearing upon Mind, which 
in this respect is passive, therefore Matter and Mind 
are two natures, not one. 

336. As much as this must be assumed before we 
can lay the foundation stone of a Philosophy of the 
Mind. In granting it, we go no further upon conjec- 
tural ground than we do at every step in prosecuting 
the physical sciences. If we hesitate to allow this 
first step, we can no more make progress than we can 
in geometry after refusing to assent to its axioms. 

337. Power must be claimed as the distinction of 
Mind when animal life is brought into comparison with 
vegetable life. Its second rudiment is its sensibility 
toward certain properties of matter ; this is, therefore, 
a passive or negative quality, even as the first is active 
or positive. 

338. We should here guard ourselves against the 
besetting illusion which impels us so often to seek in 



138 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

the etymology of words what can never he found there 
— some insight into the hidden nature of the things 
which words symbolize. We may be tempted to ask 
what the meaning is of the word here employed — 
Sensibility, or its derivatives, or its synonyms ; or of 
any other words which we may think more significant 
than these. But we shall wring nothing from the lexi- 
con that will afford us a particle of aid on this ground. 
Just as well might the chemist, in search of elements, 
take the printed labels from his drawers and bottles, 
and put them into his crucible, as we, when in search 
of facts in Mental Science, open the dictionary, or go 
on to inquire what may have been the usage of the best 
writers on these subjects ; such inquiries can affect 
nothing but the small proprieties of style. 

339. The words we use, be they what they may, 
must indicate just this fact, that our consciousness in- 
cludes what we know to be not of the Mind itself, nor 
to arise out of it, but to come in upon it from abroad, 
and that over these elements of its consciousness it ex- 
ercises only a limited control. The mind knows it- 
self to be related to a world which presses hard upon 
it in several definite modes, and from which pressure it 
has no power entirely to protect itself, even when that 
pressure has become painful. 

340. But, then, this passivity, this involuntary con- 
sciousness toward the outer world, is much modified 
by the very structure of the organs of sensation; for, 
in truth, these organs, although we think of them as 
the inlets of what is extraneous to the Mind, yet serve 
as its defense also — as its coating against these stim- 
ulants, so that, except at certain well-defined points, 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 139 

and under rigid conditions as to the intensity of the 
impression, Mind is fenced in against the external 
world. 

341. The most notable instance of this defensive 
economy is presented in the organ of sight. In its re- 
lation of sensibility to the undulations of light, the 
Mind couches in its den behind its two windows, these 
being of very small diameter ; and they are not only 
furnished with curtains, but are protected also with 
shutters and fringes in the most jealous manner. The 
same style of caution, though not to the same extent, 
attaches to each of the organs of sensation ; and thus 
an indication, if not a direct evidence, is afforded of 
the truth, that the passivity of Mind toward Matter is 
intimate, and intense, and immediate, and such that it 
could be sustained no otherwise than under conditions 
of elaborate caution and of much abatement. 

342. The active rudiment of Mind as related to 
Matter, through the muscular system, has this ad- 
vantage, that it may, in most instances, regulate for 
itself the intensity of the encounter. The solid resist- 
ance of bodies, and their vis inertice, and their gravita- 
tion, are met only in such degrees as is proportioned 
to the muscular tenacity and the safe tension of parts. 
It is only in exceptive cases, therefore, that this due 
measure is ever exceeded, or that any injury to the or- 
ganization is sustained. 

343. As to the other senses — the five, as they are 
usually accounted, or six — they are so related one to 
the other, and are so related to the central conscious- 
ness, as to induce an incessant interaction between the 
active and the passive elements of the Mind ; and it is 



140 THE WOELD OP MIND. 

from this interaction, and directly by the means of it, 
that the personal consciousness — the reflex life, the 
centralization of thought — is developed, and that it 
comes to be the habit of the Mind. 

344. This process of development may be followed 
through its stages in this manner : 

345. Vision takes place at the two extremities of 
a line which forms the base of a triangle, whereof the 
object in view is at the opposite angular point. The 
inclination of the orbits of the two eyes is, therefore, 
perpetually needing to be adjusted to the varying dis- 
tances of objects. This incessant adjustment, although 
we are ordinarily unconscious of it, is, in fact, volun- 
tary, as we find whenever an unusual case of vision 
presents itself. Being, as it is, voluntary, it may be 
regarded as that initial lesson in the learning of which 
the active rudiment of Mind accustoms itself to its 
life-long companionship with its passive rudiment. A 
conception of things external, as external, is the prod- 
uct of this habitual relationship of the one to the 
other. 

346. Every change of place, either in ourselves or 
in the things around us, offers to the eye a new image; 
but then, as the change takes place gradually — slowly 
perhaps, and as we witness it in progress from one 
instant to the next, we assign these successive pic- 
tures to one and the same external object. And thus 
it is that another step is taken in that process which 
gives us single concrete perceptions, which we accept 
as the result of many successive sensations. This 
process develops the personal consciousness, for it is 
the EGO that is thus gathering in and holding in store 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 141 

for after purposes these perceptions, or these notions 
of things existing apart from ourselves. 

347. It may well be doubted whether any repeti- 
tion of simple organic sensations, if they were not thus 
gathered up and compacted, would ever awaken that 
reflective consciousness which is the life of our mental 
life. This awakening is the fruit of the incessant play 
of the mind as an active principle upon its passive 
rudiment — its sensibility toward the properties of the 
material world. 

348. This process is greatly accelerated when the 
sensations of one organ are brought into combination 
with those of another, as, for instance, when the ear 
and the eye come into agreement respecting any object 
as the one source or cause of two kinds of sensation. 
So it is when a musical instrument, seen, is recog- 
nized as the source of the sounds we are listening to. 
Sensations of sight are then united with sensations of 
hearing ; and the two kinds, centred upon one object, 
give form and fixedness to our conceptions of the ex- 
ternal world. We come to think of all things around 
us not so much as the causes of certain impressions 
made on the senses, but as realities, existing inde- 
pendently of us, and irrespectively of our knowledge 
of them. We gain acquaintance with the objects of 
the external world sometimes by one sense alone, more 
often by two or three in combination ; and we acquire 
our knowledge of them under so many various condi- 
tions, that the things are thought of much rather than 
the particular mode in which they may have come into 
the place they occupy in our minds. 

349. But it is true in mental as well as in me- 



142 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

chanical philosophy, that action and reaction are equal. 
In thus conceiving of the objects around us apart 
from any thought of the means of our knowledge of 
them, a reaction takes place upon ourselves. We 
come to think of the EGO as an independent and in- 
tegral existence, which stands in an opposed relation- 
ship toward all these outer objects. Just in propor- 
tion as our notions of the world around us are thus 
congested, and are regarded as objects to which we 
and our welfare are related, so does the personal con- 
sciousness become a distinct feeling — a fixed habit of 
the intellectual life. The reflex life is thus developed, 
and it becomes the ground and reason of our course 
of conduct and of our individual feelings. This de- 
velopment — this thought of ourselves — on the one 
side, and of all other things and persons on the other 
side, is a distinction of human nature as compared 
with the natures around and beneath the human. 

350. Simple sensations — those, for instance, of sight 
and hearing, of touch, and taste, and smell — come and 
pass away, and would quickly be lost to conscious- 
ness. ^wX perceptions gathered from sensations, and 
especially such as combine the evidence of two or more 
of the senses, are persistent and adhesive, and they 
constitute the mind's stock of materials, to be made 
available in all kinds of intellectual and moral action. 

351. As to these stores of thought, we may adopt 
the opinion that the brain is the repository of them ; 
or we may believe that the mind is the real home of 
all thought, the brain acting only as the medium of 
transmission. Our present purpose does not require a 
decision of this question. In truth, no certain solu- 



RUDIMENTS OF MIND. 143 

tion of the problem can lbe pretended, for it is one of 
those secret things toward the discovery of which we 
possess no indications. 

352. The indisputable fact is what we have now to 
do with, and it is this : That conceptions of the things 
of the outer world — we may call them pictures — images 
— ideas — these conceptions or reiterated sensations are 
in course of being accumulated perpetually ; the fund 
is every moment on the increase ; and, by the spon- 
taneous combinations which are taking place within 
the mass, it increases itself, as one might say, at the 
rate of compound interest. 

353. This fund of images or ideas is in a state of 
incessant movement or of internal convolution, so that 
the mind, when itself it is in the least active condition, 
is presented with scenes perpetually shifting, coining 
up, and passing on, and disappearing, unsought for, 
and often unheeded. 

354. It is true that there are laws of association in 
conformity with which these exuviae, of our perceptions 
present themselves in series to the mind. These laws 
have been specified in some such manner as this : there 
is the law of chronological order, or proximity in time; 
the law of juxtaposition, or proximity in place ; and 
the law of frequency of recurrence ; the law of intens- 
ity as to the attendant emotions ; the law of artificial 
connection by means of habits ; and several other modes 
of adhesion might be named. 

355. But what we should note is this : that the 
mass of these treasures of thought, being, as it is, so 
great and so multifarious, and the laws which prevail in 
determining the sequency among them being so many, 



144 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

the separate objects present themselves in a manner 
that bears all the characteristics of sheer fortuity. To 
the mind it is as if chance, in defiance of law, prevailed 
in this department. 

356. This eddying current of ideas runs parallel 
always with the more uniform current of sensations, 
coming in from the real world around us ; and as these 
are usually the more potent, they turn it from its track 
and give it a new direction, and impart to it still more 
the aspect of fortuity. And yet it is from out of this 
ever-shifting mass of disorder that the human intelli- 
gence obtains the most admirable products. 

357. The animal mind in many, if not in all its low- 
er ranks, is, like the human mind, retentive of the im- 
pressions it receives through the senses : this we can 
not doubt. The dream of the dog, which we may al- 
most see as we watch his nervous sleep, indicates this 
fact. So does his faculty, and that of other domesti- 
cated animals, of acquiring habits show it. Keten- 
tiveness of the recollection of places, remarkable as it 
is in some animals, can be understood only on this 
supposition. But in the inferior orders this faculty 
of storing perceptions completes its purpose within 
very narrow limits, and it fails to develop any powers 
of Mind so as to become a source of free energy. In 
the human mind, at the moment when this power 
wakes up and steps forward in its own manner, the 
scene changes — the phenomena of consciousness take 
quite another character ; and that which is fortuitous, 
as well as that which is bound by law, gives way to 
that which shows its relationship to a determinative 
principle. 



HIGHER AND LOWER ORDERS OF MIND. 145 

358. We can scarcely misunderstand the purpose 
of this structure of the human mind which brings its 
active rudiment, or, we ought to say, itself into con- 
tact with this great store of materials, confusedly heap- 
ed together as they are. This intention may be traced 
in following the progress of the mind from its earliest 
period until its faculties have become consolidated. 



XL 

THE POINT OF DIVERGENCE OF THE HIGHER AND THE 
LOWER ORDERS OF MIND. 

359. The human infant, from its first days of sen- 
tient life, gives evidence that preparations are, in this 
instance, making, not merely for the development of 
faculties of a high order, but for giving the greatest 
breadth to the field upon which these faculties are to 
come into action. 

360. The actions of the animal (inferior orders) have 
their rise mainly in its instincts, appetites, wants, as 
these are related to the objects present to the senses 
from one moment to another. Yet it is not exclusive- 
ly so ; for there is a class of actions which appear to 
be prompted by ideas or images furnished from what 
may be called the stores of the brute imagination. 
The reality of this species of action may be admitted 
as more than probable, if not certain. 

361. But not at all questionable is it that, with 
man, action arises from this source in a large propor- 
tion of instances ; and thus it is that, while the incite- 
ments of volition are greatly multiplied, the energies 

G 



146 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

of Mind come to take effect with more freedom than 
otherwise they could do. 

362. The human infant, while under the discipline 
of nature, and long before maternal teaching com- 
mences, yields itself to the constant succession of sen- 
suous impressions ; it is receiving, imbibing, assimilat- 
ing the greatest possible amount of sensations : while 
awake, this passive process goes on without ceasing ; 
and during sleep — if we may so far surmise — the ac- 
cumulated stores are turned over and over, and are 
commino-led in endless modes of combination. 

O 

363. In proportion as infancy opens itself into child- 
hood, emotions of all kinds become more vivid, so that 
this operation of stocking the mind comes to be more 
and more an active process. Mind is now waking up, 
and scarcely any thing takes place within its prospect 
with which it does not in some way concern itself. 
Thus it is that sensuous ideas, inasmuch as the ac- 
companying emotion is more vivid, and also because 
the mind itself, at this time, mingles itself with every 
thing, are in themselves more and more distinct and 
more persistent ; they claim more attention, and they 
receive it. 

364. Throughout the years of childhood, these im- 
pressions, these images or ideas, are tending to fall into 
chronological order, and in doing so, they give cohe- 
rence to the consciousness of personal identity. Man 
is not man until the moment when he learns to look 
upon himself from the historical point of view. Wheth- 
er any analogous process of individualization takes 
place among the lower orders can not be known ; yet, 
if it does, probably it stops short at a point where it 
is a mere rudiment. 



HIGHER AND LOWER ORDERS OP MIND. 147 

365. Childhood, in its onward course toward matu- 
rity, passes into an intermediate condition, the char- 
acteristic of which is this : that the mind itself, or, if 
we choose to say so, its active rudiment, is much in 
excess of the appetites, wants, desires of the animal 
nature. Man, at this spring-time, has very much more 
of a vague impulse to act than of any definite motive 
for acting. This, however, is a disproportion which 
continues only for a brief period ; the equilibrium is 
soon restored, and the excess thenceforward comes to 
be on the other side. 

366. But during this brief period, whatever may be 
its date, preparations are making, under the discipline 
of nature, for the development of Mind in man of a 
far deeper meaning than has any place in the animal 
orders around him. It is now that he is learning to 
take his position as possessor of a freedom apart from 
which there could neither be intellectual expansion 
nor moral progress. 

367. Throughout this transition-period, the conduct, 
or, as it is conventionally called, " the behavior" of 
those who are passing through it, stands open to fre- 
quent criticism, and to rebuke too on the part of sen- 
ior minds ; for it has become capricious, wayward, in- 
considerate, or, to say all in a word, "thoughtless." 
But "thoughtless behavior" is not good in itself; it 
is often in a high degree inconvenient or even danger- 
ous, and therefore it should be brought under control. 
And yet it should not be so criticised or be so con- 
trolled as that the intentions of nature at this moment 
should be defeated. If, through an excess of parental 
wisdom, or by overdone discretion, nature is thwarted 



148 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

at this time, the after-man will be so much the less 
the man as he has been brought into the condition of 
a machine. 

368. In the absence or during the abeyance of pow- 
erful animal impulses, and while there is a large sug- 
gestive fund of ever-shifting imaginations, as the in- 
citements of volition, and an exuberance of energy 
which must be spent, the human mind is coming into 
the use of its inherent liberty ; it is tasting the enjoy- 
ment of its birthright — its sovereignty in relation to 
motives of all kinds. Among these motives, whether 
they may be stronger or weaker in themselves, it takes 
its sport, refusing to be enthralled by any, and spurn- 
ing every despotism : it is learning to be free. 

369. If we can bring ourselves to think of human 
nature from a physical point of view only, and if we 
simply consult consciousness, and if, with independ- 
ence of thought, we observe facts, we shall admit, on 
this ground, the reality of the distinction which is 
claimed on behalf of the human mind when it is brought 
into comparison with the animal orders around us. 
These orders, indeed, enjoy a liberty which places them 
far in advance of the ranks of vegetative life, but then 
beyond this limit the human and the animal mind, 
cease to run abreast. 

370. It can only be on some purely hypothetic 
ground — perhaps theological or metaphysical, or per- 
haps merely logical — that this distinction will be call- 
ed in question or that it can be denied. With such 
grounds of exception we need not now be concerned. 
Human nature and the brute nature diverge at this 
point, and thenceforward they are separated by an 
ever-widening interval. 



HIGHER AND LOWER ORDERS OF MIND. 149 

371. In those classes of animals whose appetites 
are the most vehement and peremptory, volition, if it 
"be not all of one sort, is nearly so, and the same, al- 
most, may be affirmed of those unhappy beings in hu- 
man form who have long surrendered themselves to 
the tyranny of animal appetites. But it is far other- 
wise when human nature expands itself under favora- 
ble conditions, and when culture, intellectual and mor- 
al, comes in to preserve a due equilibrium among its 
various energies. 

372. In this case — and we need not now include 
any ingredients of a religious kind — in this case, voli- 
tion takes place in more modes than one, as thus : 
Sometimes, and often it is so, the immediate objects 
to which instincts or appetites stand related in the or- 
der of nature are presented to the senses, and they are 
at once pursued and possessed. Sometimes, and it is 
not seldom, even when the more direct incitement is 
present, volition takes its rise, not in this elementary 
manner, but at the suggestion of some notion, or feel- 
ing, or idea, which has come up at the moment — per- 
haps unsought for ; most often it arises in accordance 
with a law of habit, or as the consequence of some 
moral association. Sometimes, and by no means in 
rare instances, volition takes its rise, even while strong 
influences are full in view, in a manner the explication 
of which must involve the assumption of an hypothe- 
sis of some kind. 

373. We may content ourselves with an a priori 
hypothesis, and give assent to the metaphysical con- 
clusion, that as every event must have its cause — ani- 
mal volitions included — the cause of a volition, in ev- 



150 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

eiy instance, is, and must be, a motive foreign to the 
voluntary power, or anterior to it / and that, in every 
such instance, the strongest among several motives 
then present to the mind always prevails : it does, and 
it must prevail, because, as compared with any other 
motive, it proves itself to be the efficient one. To ob- 
viate any objections to which this formal demonstra- 
tion may be liable, contradicted as it is by our con- 
sciousness, it may be affirmed that the actual motive, 
in any case, may be of so attenuated or evanescent a 
kind as that it is quite unperceived by ourselves ; we 
are either unconscious of its presence, or we underrate 
its powers ; or perhaps it is of such a kind that we 
avert the eye from it, and refuse to recognize it as the 
real reason of our conduct. Let it be so ; and, with- 
out doubt, there is a large class of volitions which owe 
their rise to invisible influences of this very kind. 

374. But if consciousness be appealed to — hypothe- 
sis apart — it will attest the fact that there is a class 
of our volitions which is not included in those now 
mentioned. Whether, if we could penetrate to the 
adytum of human nature, we should find the functions 
of the mind to be what metaphysicians affirm them to 
be, or not, yet, in fact, consciousness — in human na- 
ture — supports the belief that there are volitions which 
are not peremptorily swayed or are not determined by 
the stronger among motives ; there are volitions which, 
in a sense distinctive of the human mind, are free. 

375. So long as our consciousness, exempt from 
sophistications, retains this belief, it constitutes the 
saving; element as well in our intellectual as in the 
moral constitution. While man believes himself to be 



HIGHER AND LOWER ORDERS OF MIND. 151 

possessed of a power which is irrespective of the ab- 
solute sway of instincts and appetites, whether of a 
lower or of a higher order, and which is superior to 
them all, so long does he retain in his grasp the spring 
of progress, advancement, renovation, and every good 
which the limits of his nature may bring into his pros- 
pect of futurity. 

376. It is a principle to which we may, with little 
risk, commit ourselves, that if A belief, whatever it 
may be, takes its place as a constituent among the 
functions of the intellectual or moral life, and if it be 
essential to their healthful exercise, such a belief is not 
an illusion, but a reality. So it is as to our instinct- 
ive belief of the objective reality of the external world, 
and so, also, as to the constancy of nature. The be- 
lief, instinctive as it is, of the absolute independence 
of Mind in human nature, may, in like manner, be as- 
sumed to be well founded, because it is needed as a 
function of our intellectual as well as moral nature. 
The early developments of human nature are manifest 
indications of the place that is to be assigned to this 
belief in the mature man. 

377. Often does it happen that the boy, full of life, 
of fun, and of folly, when he is attended by his pet 
friend, his dog, or his pony, may suffer a disadvantage 
in the eye of severe wisdom ; for, in truth, the quadru- 
ped shows himself, on many occasions, to be the more 
discreet of the two, the more considerate, and the more 
thoughtful. But if the intention of nature be taken 
into the account, the advantage will appear to be im- 
measurably on the other side. The quadruped obeys 
and follows the bare reason of the case, so far as that 



152 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

reason comes within his view ; the infant man may 
have a wider prospect of this reason, and he may see 
it more clearly, but yet he spurns it : he asserts his 
prerogative to see reason and to reject it. The animal 
comes early into possession of all the truth and all the 
wisdom of which he can ever make himself master; he 
reaches it on a straight path, and a short one. But 
man is destined to acquaint himself with truth and wis- 
dom to an extent that is incalculable, and to reach it on 
a path that is circuitous and devious, and upon which 
he could not set a step hopefully if, with him, the law 
of thought and volition were peremptory and determi- 
native, as it is with the brute orders around him. 

378. It is when we bring human nature, under its 
different aspects, into comparison with the natures 
around us, that we see how immeasurably far in ad- 
vance of them is the position which it occupies. When 
the two orders of Mind are thus placed side by side, 
it becomes manifest that to the one there belongs a de- 
gree and a kind of power of which the other possesses 
barely a rudiment. 

379. Aided by this comparative method, we shall 
the more clearly see that while, as we have already af- 
firmed (216), the liberty of the human mind is the nec- 
essary condition of a moral system, it is also, and in 
a not less absolute sense, the necessary condition of 
intellectual development, and of those advancements 
which raise the civilized man so far above the level 
of man in a savage state. 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 153 



XII. 
INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 

380. In illustration of the intelligence of the animal 
orders, and in proof of the appliant reasoning faculty 
that is possessed by certain species, especially by the 
elephant, the dog, the ape, volumes of instances are at 
hand. But as to this body of evidence, ample and va- 
rious as it may be, as well as curious and significant, 
the whole of it has the fragmentary character which we 
designate by the term anecdote. These hundreds of 
instances are all of them single incidents in the biog- 
raphy of this or that spaniel, or elephant, or monkey. 
The story begins and it ends with the individual pet 
that has so signalized its wit or its providence. 

381. But that which we have to appeal to in illus- 
tration of the intelligence of man is not a book of anec- 
dotes, but it is a copious history ; it is a history in the 
course of which, although illustrious individual minds 
head the chapters, yet they always do so as the teach- 
ers and leaders of communities and nations. This his- 
tory, which dates its beginning from the earliest de- 
velopments of reason, is now in mid-course, and it shall 
reach its consummation, if ever, in an age that is im- 
mensely remote. 

382. What we have to seek for, therefore, when, on 
the one hand, this volume of anecdotes, and, on the 
other hand, this great history, are before us, and are 

G2 



154 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

waiting to be disposed of, according to the admitted 
usages of scientific generalization, is not to show that 
reason in the brute orders and reason in man are pow- 
ers generically different, which they are not, but we 
have to discover what those conditions of the reason- 
ing faculty are which, being present in the one case 
and absent in the other, render human reason a germ- 
inant power, tending always toward products which 
are yet to be realized, while brute reason reaches its 
end and is spent in the immediate occasion which has 
called it forth. 

383. Brute reason is called forth at the impulse of 
some motive which dies out at the moment when its 
single purpose has been accomplished. Human reason 
is also called forth in this same manner in thousands 
of instances ; but, beside and beyond this, it obeys the 
guidance of tranquil emotions which, instead of finding 
their end in the first occasion, gather strength always 
as they go forward, and which at length form them- 
selves into habits of the individual mind, and so ac- 
quire the force of a prevailing disposition : these emo- 
tions give direction to the faculties and to the tastes 
which they evoke and develop. 

384. We have affirmed, on behalf of the inferior ani- 
mal orders, that they possess a pleasurable conscious- 
ness of melody, and perhaps of harmony, in sounds, 
and that they have a consciousness, also, of beauty in 
forms and colors. So much of intellectuality as may 
be implied in this sensibility ought to be allowed to 
them. Facts, the meaning of which can scarcely be 
thought questionable, sustain this belief; but there are 
no facts (or we recollect none) which would indicate 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 155 

the presence of that kind of germinant intellectuality 
of which the infant man gives evidence almost from the 
earliest days of his becoming percipient toward the 
world around him. 

385. As soon as the infant begins, at his own mo- 
tion, to amuse himself, and to create for himself a 
theatre of delight out of any fragments that come 
within his reach, he does so in a manner to which 
nothing in the sports ot young animals has the least 
resemblance, and which may be taken as a sure prog- 
nostic of that boundless intellectual ambition which 
will find its limit nowhere short of the circuit of the 
stellar universe, nor be content even there. 

386. A pleasurable consciousness toward the ob- 
jects, the forms, the colors, the movements of the 
world around us, may be intense, as perhaps with 
some animals it is, and yet it may come and go, leav- 
ing no trace of itself or any product. But such a con- 
sciousness, although much less intense, yet, if it links 
itself with the reason or with some moral sentiment, 
may become the spring and beginning of interminable 
advancements. On this ground we soon find our- 
selves diverging rapidly from the parallel of the ani- 
mal mind. 

387. The most knowing of dogs or of elephants is 
left far in the rear on the field of reason by the human 
infant that employs itself in sorting a lapful of beans 
by their colors or sizes, and is seen to be arranging 
them in lines and circles. The baby experimenter, 
lost as he seems to the things about him, has caught 
hold of a clew of abstraction, or of resemblance, or of 
contrast, or of analogy, and, if not now, yet in some 



156 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

time future he will follow it with ardor, even though 
it lead him as far as the outskirts of creation. 

388. The human infant, with his marbles, or his 
beans, or his shells, or his petals of the tulip, or his 
bits of earthenware spread out before him, is, we have 
said, so occupied in a world of abstractions as to be 
lost to the things around him. Here, then, we should 
note the early development of a faculty from which all 
other developments take their rise — the power, namely, 
to take up and to follow any single line of perceptions, 
or any single series of ideas, while other simultaneous 
impressions on the senses are disregarded or are held 
in abeyance. 

389. This faculty — a primary distinction, as it is, 
of the human mind — implies, first, but not merely or 
chiefly, the power to follow one series of perceptions 
among several which may be of equal force, but for 
attending to which there may be some especial motive, 
as when we listen to footsteps in a dark and stormy 
night, which may be those of an expected friend or of 
a dreaded foe. 

390. But beyond this discretive power, and of much 
more significance, is that which enables us surely and 
easily to take up some one series of sensations from 
out of a number that are all equally intense, or are 
nearly so, and in regard to which no appreciable mo- 
tive attaches to one rather than to any of the others. 

391. The examples are such as these : In a concert 
of many voices, the several voices being of nearly equal 
intensity, regarded merely as organic impressions on 
the auditory nerve, we select one, and, at will, we lift 
it out, and disjoin it from the general volume of sound; 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIE RESULTS. 157 

we shut off the other voices, five, ten, or more, and 
follow this one alone. When we have done so for a 
time, we freely cast it off and take up another. In 
this manner to listen discretively does not imply any 
extraordinary nicety of the ear or any rare power of 
attention. Thus it is that a narrow line of percep- 
tions belonging to one sense may be pursued, to the 
exclusion not only of many impressions upon the same 
sense, but of many distracting impressions upon the 
other senses, as of the fair forms and gay colors of the 
company around us. 

392. A like discretive power is exercised in the 
sphere of each of the senses ; thus it is that the expe- 
rienced cook judges not only of the " far too much," 
but of the " much too little" of some one ingredient in 
the compound upon which the epicure, his master, 
shall bestow his commendation. So it is in the sense 
of smell, and so of touch. As to the muscular sense, 
it should be considered as differing essentially from the 
sense of touch. This muscular sense is, in an eminent 
manner, discretive ; for it is able, among many con- 
ceptions as well as among perceptions, to fix upon one, 
even when the neighboring perceptions differ from it 
only in the smallest degree. For instance, a practiced 
corn-dealer takes in hand, at random, an ounce or two 
of wheat, barley, oats, and closing his eyes, and pois- 
ing this indefinite quantity a while in his hand, he will 
tell you confidently, and within half a pound of the 
truth, what will be the weight of a bushel of the same 
sample. In this nice operation the mind is bringing 
into comparison its recollected feeling of the weight of 
a sample of forty pounds to the bushel, and of forty- 



158 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

one, and forty-two, and forty-three, and forty-four, 
and forty-five ; and then it hypothetically compares 
the weight of the quantity now in hand with each of 
these approximate remembrances. 

393. Many instances, usually adduced in illustra- 
tion of the discretiveness of the visual organ, belong 
rather to physiology than to the science -of Mind, but 
there are others which are quite proper to our present 
subject. To fix attention upon a single object among 
many that lie within the field of vision is no doubt an 
act of the mind, but it is one of a class which may be 
left to the physiologist, who will give it a place in his 
chapter upon the eye. 

394. Technical habits, and technical faculties in 
seeing, such as those of the painter, are nothing more 
than eminent instances of what the human mind, ge- 
nerically, is capable of when much culture has been be- 
stowed upon single powers. We take up, then, the 
instance of the educated and practiced artist (the term 
is here employed in its highest sense) in illustration of 
certain powers of mind which are distinctive of human 
nature. 

395. Take such an instance as this : To the man 
who is born for the fine arts, whether painting or 
sculpture (and now let us say the former), many tran- 
quil and yet intensely pleasurable emotions attend the 
perceptions of sight. These emotions find their ob- 
jects in those three conditions of the visible world un- 
der which objects are pictured, as one blended sensa- 
tion, upon the retina. These three conditions are those 
of form or contour, of light and shade, and of color. 
The separation of the three is an acquired or technical 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 159 

ability, for undoubtedly the three are neither distin- 
guished, nor are they discretively held apart, in the 
mere organic sensations of sight. 

396. But the man who, first by special endowment 
of nature, and then by habit and culture, has become 
keenly alive to these three elements, finds it easy — in 
truth, he is doing it perpetually and almost uncon- 
sciously — to set off one of these elements from the 
other two, and to regard it, pictorially, apart from the 
others ; then to dismiss this one and to take up anoth- 
er, and so to pass rapidly from one to the other, and 
to combine any two, rejecting the third ; and then to 
bring together the three in some final combination. 
The painter, we may suppose, is looking upon a group 
of persons gayly attired, and assembled under full 
sunlight. In this group there may be forms that are 
graceful and beautiful in the sense of Phidias or of 
Raphael ; there may be forms that are picturesque and 
full of character in the sense of Teniers or of Wilkie ; 
then there may be combinations of colors, rich and 
deep, in the sense of Titian or of Rubens ; then there 
may be striking effects of light and shade in the sense 
of Rembrandt. These very same forms, and these 
colors, and these lights and shadows, are falling alike 
upon the eyes of all spectators, but it is alone the 
painter's eye which has learned to set off element from 
element, and it is he alone who, in successive moments, 
sees form and outline as if there were no colors, and 
no light or shadow, and again sees color as if there 
were neither contours nor shadows, and yet again sees 
light and shadow quite apart from outline and from 
color. 



160 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

397. In this instance, and it is only one out of 
many that might be adduced to illustrate the same 
principle, what is noticeable is this, that the human 
mind, at the impulse of a certain class of pleasure- 
fraught sensibilities or tastes, and under the guidance 
of habitual emotions that are of a tranquil kind, exerts 
its power of abstraction and of synthesis in and upon 
the groundwork of its merely organic sensations. This 
pleasurable consciousness is equable in regard to the 
diverse elements that may be in view ; the mind is ex- 
cited, but it is not swayed or determined ; its power is 
stimulated, but it is not constrained or necessitated, 
and it takes a free course over the field of its ideal 
treasures and of its perceptions with the most absolute 
sovereignty. 

398. That which is characteristic of this class of 
emotions is this, that they are non-emotional in any 
such manner as are those which arise at the impulse 
of the appetites, or the social sentiments, or the irasci- 
ble passions. They do, indeed, deeply move the mind, 
and they call out its latent faculties, but they do so 
always in a measured degree ; the force with which 
they act may be intense, but it is never impetuous or 
tumultuous. 

399. A vivid pleasurable sense of resemblance, and 
of any sort of symbolic meaning, when it presents it- 
self under and amid diversities, possesses especially 
this characteristic intensity with serenity. Neverthe- 
less, although it be unimpassioned and silent, this feel- 
ing is one of the most productive of those energies 
which distinguish human nature. 

400. At a very early age, a child of vivacious tem- 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 161 

perament gives evidence of his sensibility toward ob- 
jects of any sort which, on the ground of, perhaps, a 
very remote resemblance, call up the recollection or 
image of some object that is not then present. A 
stain upon the wall, a momentary form of the clouds, 
or the rudest limnings of the mother's pencil, are hail- 
ed with glee when they are looked at as likenesses of 
a face, a figure, or as the intended portraiture of a cow 
or horse. No approach to any such recognitions, no 
indication of any such sensibilities, are discoverable in 
the actions or habits of any species of animals. It is 
true that a dog or a cat may, for a moment, be deceived 
by a picture, but never is it attracted by a rude, an 
imperfect, or a sketch-like resemblance of objects. 

401. In these instances, full of meaning as they are, 
what is it that takes place ? Whence springs the 
pleasure which we see to be indicated when they oc- 
cur? It may be well to inquire. Let the example 
we take in hand be one of familiar experience. In a 
woodland ramble — a new walk, perhaps — we come up 
to the gnarled trunk of an oak which has stood leaf- 
less through the summers of a century. It seems to 
bestride the path as a giant ; it stretches out savage 
arms, as if to forbid our advance ; its knotted head ex- 
hibits some strange similitude of features — eyes, nose, 
and wide-extended jaws ; we gaze a moment in sur- 
prise, but the next moment find a vivid pleasure in 
contemplating this wild caricature of humanity. Time, 
helped by the winds, and heats, and frosts of centuries, 
has been the artist in this case ; no knife or chisel has 
touched the work. 

402. In this case we may assume that there is quite 



162 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

enough of likeness to attract the eye and to fix atten- 
tion, and yet there is also an extreme unlikeness in 
every thing but just this rude resemblance of form. 
The resemblance which we recognize is that between 
the actual object now in view and some conceptions 
of gigantic or monstrous humanity, which this form, 
at the first aspect of it, has evoked. With a sudden 
force, the object before the eye has awakened the con- 
ceptive faculty ; various ideals of the human figure are 
crowding up at this summons, and we find a pleasure 
in imputing each of them, in its turn, to the rough 
mass before us. 

403. A fortuitous resemblance of this sort has 
(might we not say so) fallen like a spark upon the am- 
pie stores of the conceptive faculty, and these, rich and 
various as they may be, are quick in furnishing mate- 
rials for almost endless suppositions, each having its 
meaning, which we impute to the object before us. 
The pleasurable sense of resemblance and of analogy, 
when once it has been evolved, seeks on all sides for 
its proper gratification, and it finds them in abundance. 
An emotion of a kind which is purely intellectual, and 
which, however intense, yet never becomes distracting 
or turbulent, and which never induces exhaustion, 
forms itself gradually into a habit of the individual 
mind, and, as such, it is the prolific source of imagina- 
tive art and of poetry. 

404. Philosophy — not, indeed, the empirical knowl- 
edge of utilities, but that which is the product of the 
highest thought — philosophy takes its rise from a sim- 
ilarly rudimental class of emotions. Noiseless they 
are in their earliest developments, and they are dis- 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 163 

tinguished always, even when they have acquired a pre- 
vailing momentum in the character, by their quiescence. 

405. We are accustomed to think of the great men 
who have led the way in philosophy as men gifted by 
nature with pre-eminent powers of reason, and of rea- 
son only ; but we do not so usually keep in view that 
other endowment, apart from which such powers would 
have remained latent, namely, an intensity of those 
emotions which we designate as intellectual. To the 
man who from the ranks raises himself to a seat among 
princes, or who becomes a prince among princes, we 
attribute not only great powers of mind, but a restless 
ambition, with its cognate vehement impulses and its 
lawless passions. Meanwhile we imagine the philoso- 
pher to be so constituted as that mere reason is the 
whole of his nature ; yet, in truth, the difference be- 
tween Alexander and Aristotle, between Cromwell and 
Newton, between Napoleon and La Place, or D'Alem- 
bert, is not that ot mental power with or without emo- 
tional energies, but it is between one species of emo- 
tion and another ; it is between impetuous and stormy 
passions on the one side, and deep sensibilities toward 
universal truth on the other side. In pursuit of truth 
there is a steadfast earnestness, such as may sustain 
the severest labors. 

406. The arts of life and the applicate sciences have 
their rise in the urgent necessities of our animal well- 
being, but philosophy springs from a far higher source. 
Practical science and philosophy, it is true, must not 
be disjoined, for they should minister one to the other, 
yet should they ever be distinguished as to their ori- 
gin and as to their true intention. 



164 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

407. The common phrase, "the love of truth," is 
somewhat vague, including, as it does, moral senti- 
ments along with intellectual tendencies or -tastes. 
What we have just now in view is a feeling or im- 
pulse that is paramount in some minds, and which has 
no immediate bearing upon moral principles or dispo- 
sitions. It is the impulse to become cognizant of 
whatever is true and certain in the world of causation 
and in the region of abstract relations. 

408. The pleasurable sense which already we have 
affirmed to be attendant upon the discernment of re- 
semblances or of symbolic analogies is so vivid that it 
well sustains any labors that it may prompt us to un- 
dertake for its gratification. But the higher impulse 
which we have now to speak of wears a much more 
severe aspect ; it is, indeed, deep and irresistible, and 
it abounds in fruits of enjoyment, yet it is such as will 
be needed to sustain the arduous, and painful, and un- 
requited labors of a self-denying life. 

409. The true philosophic passion — if passion we 
may call that which is unimjoassioned — is a far more 
rare gift of nature than is the sensibility to resem- 
blances above spoken of; or we should say that it is 
rare as conjoined with a corresponding vigor in the 
reasoning faculty; and it is only when this passion 
for truth is conjoined with force in the intellect that it 
can become noticeable. 

410. Mathematical science, concerned with the rela- 
tions of number and extension, had its rise, as we are 
told, along with the mechanic arts, on the level of the 
immediate necessities of life, and at all times has it 
been pursued at the instigation of various secondary 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 165 

motives, none of which come just now within our 
prospect. But it is certain that, if it had listened to 
no prompting of a higher kind than this, it would nev- 
er have stretched itself out so as to embrace, as it now 
does, the philosophy of the heavens. 

411. Mathematical science, although Tborn and 
nursed for a time among the arts of life, did not long 
fail to draw to itself a certain class of minds, in the 
view of which its remoter revelations — aways bright 
and sure — kindled a species of ardor which thencefor- 
ward was to rule the intellect and to govern the life of 
the man. There is, perhaps, no intensity of the mind 
more intense, or more exclusive, or more determina- 
tive than that which leads a certain order of intellect 
onward, and onward still, on the ascending path of 
mathematical abstraction. 

412. There is good room to ask whether the pecul- 
iar energy of what might be called the mathematical 
soul does not carry with it a deep meaning, and declare 
the truth of man's destination at the first, and of his 
destiny still to take a place and to act a part in a world 
of manifested truth and of eternal order. Do we ven- 
ture too far in saying that, when mathematical abstrac- 
tions of the higher sort take possession of a vigorous 
reason, there is placed before us a tacit recognition 
(one among several, all carrying the same meaning) 
of the fact that the human mind is so framed as to 
find its home nowhere but in a sphere within which 
the absolute and the unchangeable shall stand reveal- 
ed in the view of the finite intelligence ? 

413. This at least is certain, that, on the low levels 
of this cloud-girt, troubled, care-worn world, wherein 



166 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

purposeless contradictions and futile controversy, 
wherein strife and sophistry, prejudice and folly, and 
sinister influences, mar so much our comfort in the 
pursuit of truth, and prevent, so far, our peaceful fru- 
ition of it — it is certain that the uncontradicted con- 
clusions and the unchanging realities of mathematical 
science afford a rest, and a sense of safety, and a ref- 
uge, which nowhere else can be found among the things 
of earth. 

414. These recommendations of mathematical phi- 
losophy, which are quite peculiar to itself, bring to 
view with distinctness the operation of the Intellectual 
Emotions in carrying the human mind ever upward 
and forward toward a stage of thought that is immeas- 
urably remote from that narrow boundary within 
which reasons of utility exert their influence. 

415. A theorem demonstrated is not so much a 
single truth made good as it is an indication of truths 
which are yet in advance of itself, and which will come 
to take their bearing upon it. A theorem established 
is always a germinating principle, and its powers wait 
to be developed in the course of the process which is 
to follow next in logical order. A method of reason- 
ing, the validity of which has been proved by the cer- 
tainty of its results in several of its applications, is a 
power that has been put into our hands, and which we 
must hasten to apply to other purposes. A problem 
solved is the guarantee of our success in attempting 
the solution of problems still more difficult, and which 
stand in front of our present position. 

416. It is thus that mathematical science evokes 
and feeds the reason to an extent that is not easily 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 167 

estimated ; it does so "by quickening those emotions 
that are, in the fullest sense, intellectual, namely, the 
instinctive desire to know — the tranquil acquiescence 
in what comes to us, without a shadow of doubt, as 
true — the impatient desire to use any power of which 
we have lately possessed ourselves ; and, not least, 
that deepest and most potent, that earliest Tborn, and 
last to be relinquished of all our emotions, hope, and 
the ambition of progress. 

417. So intense is the force of these purely intel- 
lectual impulses when they are called into play by the 
higher kinds of mathematical abstraction, that they 
avail to bear the human reason aloft into a region that 
has no connection with the wants or desires, real or 
factitious, of our animal or social well-being. Keep- 
ing scrupulously clear of exaggeration on this ground, 
let it be recollected whither it is that these same emo- 
tions, taking their effect in the sphere of mathematical 
philosophy, have now actually carried the human mind. 
Aided by instruments which the necessities of reason 
itself have called into existence, man, in these last 
times, has well demonstrated the homogeneousness 
of his mind with the Supreme Creative Mind, and he 
has done so on a field not narrow, for it is as wide as 
the stellar universe. There can be no irreverence — 
there can be no presumption in plainly stating a fact 
which rests upon evidence so clear and sure. Even 
if this same averment were made in terms still stronger 
and more comprehensive, we need not fear a rebuke 
on the part of Christian piety, for what we so affirm 
does but illustrate and attest the Biblical doctrine 
that " God made man in His own imap-c." 



168 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

418. It is not the faculty merely, or the force of 
reason, but it is reason vivified and stimulated by 
emotions or desires of a purely intellectual order that 
has enabled the mathematician to bring the remotest 
futurity of the planetary system within the range of 
his calculations. It is thus that man, whose individ- 
ual life is but of a few days, has come to compute the 
celestial a?ons, and to determine the moment when this 
machinery, having at length reached its limit of stable 
equilibrium, shall reverse itself, and shall start anew 
in the recovery of its primasval order. 

419. Intellectual emotions that are much the same 
in their elements take effect in a somewhat different 
manner within the region of physical philosophy, where 
it is not Relation, but Causation of which we are in 
quest. 

420. Far away from any regard to the utilities of 
common life, the philosophy of which now we are to 
speak takes for its subject or theme Causation, 
whether this be considered as invariable sequency 
only, or be thought of in a dynamic sense, as imply- 
ing the presence of an efficient power, proximate as 
to the effect. 

421. The desire to know, so powerful an instinct 
as it is of human nature, not only prompts us to ac- 
quaint ourselves with all forms of the visible world, 
and with all varieties of structure and function among 
organized beings, but also to become cognizant of 
Causes. This is a peculiar and a higher mode of the 
same instinct, and it is such that it claims to be con- 
sidered by itself. In some minds the impulse is in 
such a degree paramount, and it so prevails over all 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 169 

other motives as to become the one characteristic of 
the individual — it is the law of his existence. 

422. The desire, which amounts to an impatience, 
to be cognizant of causes, and in which impulse phi- 
losophy takes its rise, is clearly to be traced up to 
that rudiment of Mind, or, we may say, to its own 
nature — to itself- — as the first and only cause of which 
it has any direct knowledge. 

423. Mind in its essence — Power — instinctively re- 
gards all things around it in the light in which they 
appear when seen from this central point, which, in 
an especial sense, is its own point of view. This 
first element of consciousness gives rise to an hy- 
pothesis of causality, or a supposition of some latent 
force in every instance in which a movement of any 
kind, or a change from one condition to another, takes 
place in our view. And thus, too, even a&- to those 
forms or conditions of things which are unchanging, 
or which appear to be so, the same feeling impels us 
to regard them under their historical aspect, and to go 
back to the moment, however remote it may have been, 
when they were not what they now are, but when they 
became such as they now are as the result of an effi- 
cient cause. Thus it is that the geologist inquires 
concerning the origin of primaeval rocks. 

424. A degree of restlessness, or an impatience, or 
feeling of perplexity, which is more or less painful, 
ensues whenever we are baffled, or are brought to a 
stand in our endeavors to ascertain causes. Amid 
feelings which thus far are not pleasurable, Philosophy 
comes to the birth ; but at an early era after its birth 
it shows its assimilative tendency toward the brighter 

H 



170 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

elements of our nature. The pursuit of causation 
quickly becomes animated, and eager, and hopeful, in 
the sense of a healthful energy, the exercise of which 
is in the highest degree pleasurable. 

425. The philosophy of causation, when it is adopted 
as the occupation of a life, and when it is pursued at the 
impulse of that intellectual emotion which, strengthens 
itself by indulgence, sets the human reason forward 
on a course that can have no calculable end. Indi- 
vidual minds may indeed cease to go on upon this 
high road, fatigued by its toils ; and it has happened 
once and again in the history of nations that certain 
races which had been illustrious leaders thereupon 
have lost their zest, have forfeited their honors, and 
fallen from their position. Nevertheless, new-comers, 
in an after age, have set foot on the same road ; nor 
can we now imagine such an event as that the human 
family every where should at any future time sur- 
render, or should cease to employ its prerogative of 
advancement on this ground. 

426. The work of classification in bringing multi- 
plicity into order, on the ground of visible resem- 
blances or analogies, is a less rare development of that 
impulse of which physical philosophy is the product. 
Classification concerns itself only with what is visible 
and palpable ; but Generalization takes little account 
of the exterior, or it never stops there : it goes down 
beneath the surface of things, and seizes, not resem- 
blances of figure, but identities of powers or of laws. 

427. We have already spoken (186) of the tenden- 
cy of the mind to bring all things with which it con- 
cerns itself into a centralized arrangement as related 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIE EESULTS. 171 

to its own faculties, This tendency shows itself in 
the rise and the advances of the higher philosophy. 
The ancient generalizations, which, if they were not 
wholly regardless of facts, yet dealt with the phenom- 
ena of nature in a willful and arbitrary manner, were 
all so many expressions of the centripetal direction of 
thought, resulting from the constitution of the mind. 
Each of those ancient theories of the universe which 
finds its place in a history of philosophy furnishes an 
instance that might be adduced in support of what we 
here affirm. The human mind not merely seeks to 
relieve itself from distraction by means of classifica- 
tion, but also, and with still more earnestness, it seeks 
to reduce causation to a scheme within which all phe- 
nomena shall arrange themselves, as if in a radial man- 
ner, itself at the centre. 

428. The revolution effected by the spread of the 
Baconian philosophy, so far as that revolution ought 
to be attributed to the writings of Lord Bacon, did 
not contravene this tendency (for it would have set us 
wrong if it had), but it stipulated on behalf of Nature 
that she should ever be listened to before the central- 
izing process was set forward. Our modern philoso- 
phy, therefore, has this merit as compared with the 
ancient philosophy, that its generalizations are always 
held open to correction from facts, and thus it is under 
a continuous course of revision, the central point of 
human science approximating continually to the true 
and real centre of the material world ; that is to say, 
the point where all causes or laws are converging, and 
are resolving themselves into the fewest and the sim- 
plest principles. 



172 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

429. As yet, our modern philosophy is far from 
having brought itself up to the position that has been 
attained by mathematical science. This latter is a 
sheer product of thought, and the mind which has pro- 
duced it is fully competent to dispose of all abstrac- 
tions which it is able to note and to symbolize with- 
out risk of error. But the former has to do with those 
relations among the properties of the material world 
which spring from its hidden constitution, and which 
are, and which probably must ever remain, unknown. 

430. Incomplete, however, as is our modern philos- 
ophy, it will continue to be filling up its voids and 
simplifying its deductions from day to day. It will 
do so, only supposing that the light of knowledge and 
that our civilization are not doomed to undergo ex- 
tinction. It will thus constantly advance, first, be- 
cause those intellectual emotions which are the spring 
of the higher philosophy gather strength, intensity, 
and animation from every instance of an achieved suc- 
cess ; and, secondly, this progress may be spoken of 
as certain, because at length our modern philosophy 
has cordially accepted her true position as the inter- 
preter of Nature, and nothing more. Human reason 
has renounced its fallacious ambition to deduce a phi- 
losophy from its own resources. 

431. There remains, on this ground, to be noticed 
a class of intellectual emotions which, though they are 
of a somewhat lower bearing, are of no inferior import- 
ance in the economy of our intellectual existence. 

432. A single phrase which should well designate 
the impulses now in view is not easily found. But 
in any case, if a sufficient number of instances are ad- 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 173 

duced, so as to put out of doubt what is intended, the 
exact propriety of words and phrases will Toe of minor 
importance. What we are now intending may he 
spoken of as the Constructive Impulse. 

433. Here again, and in a signal manner, the fact 
presents itself that the primary incitement which the 
human mind receives from the stern necessities of an- 
imal life does not stop when those necessities have 
been supplied ; far beyond this point the movement 
goes on, waking up faculties which, instead of being 
content with the first successes, are thereby so much 
the more invigorated and emboldened, and which shall 
reach their boundary never, so long as another step in 
advance is not plainly impossible. 

434. Those animal species that are constructive in 
their instincts start from a point some way in advance 
of that at which man makes his beginning as a work- 
man, for they begin, if not without tools, yet with 
those tools only which nature has bestowed upon 
them. Man finds himself almost utterly destitute ; 
indeed, he is the most wretched, the most indigent, 
and the most defenseless of all creatures until he lias 
contrived and fashioned a tool, or, rather, a set of tools. 
His thumb-furnished hand — unique apparatus though 
it be — is not itself a tool, but it is a tool-holder, and 
it soon appears that the human hand and the human 
reason are complementary the one of the other. 

435. The constructive orders around us not merely 
start, as we say, from an advanced position in setting 
about their day's work, but they go straight forward 
toward their end, losing no time, wasting no strength 
in blunders or in earning experience at a dear rate ; 



174 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

they meet no vexations in attempting what they find 
at last to be impracticable. But then, when the im- 
mediate end of animal labor is attained, when the task 
is completed "according to order," nothing more, noth- 
ing in the way of experiment, in the hope of improve- 
ment, is ever attempted. The boundary-line which 
encircles the mechanic and constructive ingenuity of 
the animal orders has no parallax ; it is as fixed as 
fate. 

436. And so — or very nearly so — does it seem to be 
among those degenerate races of the human family 
with whom the abstractive faculty has for many gen- 
erations been dormant, and among whom the rugged 

O OS 

necessities of savage life press hard, and press con- 
stantly, not only upon the many, but upon the special- 
ly endowed few. It is not to be doubted that one or 
two of the race of Bezaleel and Aholiab, and Tubal- 
Cain also, are born into every tribe that prowls through 
untilled wildernesses ; but then these gifted few are 
indulged with no reprieves from the penal conditions 
of savage life, such as might favor the expansion of 
those intellectual emotions which are dead asleep in 
their natures. 

437. It is when these emotions are quickened, it is 
when these elements have received their yeast of fer- 
mentation, that the man — constructive — goes on from 
tool-making and weapon-making in the rudest style to 
machine-making, first of a rude kind, but at length to 
machine-making of so refined a sort that the human 
intelligence comes to diffuse itself and to breathe its 
own meaning into hard materials. All the metals and 
all the woods, all chemical matters, along with the 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 175 

most occult forces of the material system, come to be 
moulded into (might one so say) dumb proxies of rea- 
son itself, achieving tasks a thousand times more dif- 
ficult than any which hands and limbs could attempt. 

438. It is first at the instigation of hard necessity, 
but it is only just at the first start that man becomes 
constructive. Soon, if indeed he has entered upon the 
course of advancement, he wakes up, and obeys that 
purely intellectual impulse which carries him forward, 
never again to stop until he shall have worked up all 
the materials of nature, and shall have converted to 
his purposes all its powers, and shall quite fail to im- 
agine any further possible adjustment of these that 
might engage his energies. 

439. Here, and once again, the intellectual emotions 
may be traced to their rise in that element of Mind 
which is its primary distinction. The human mind 
follows mathematical abstractions with so much eager- 
ness, because its theorems come before it as instru- 
ments or means for knowing more than it yet knows, 
and for doing more than it has yet done. And thus, 
too, Mind, as power, goes in quest of causation, for it 
is the knowledge of causes and of comprehensive laws 
which brings it into a commanding position toward 
the multiform phenomena of the material world. In 
like manner, though acting in a different direction, 
Mind, as power, becomes inventive and constructive ; 
and it does so that it may extend its forces over the 
greatest possible breadth of the material system, and 
that it may bring the elementary agencies of nature 
under its control and into its service. 

440. Mind, vivified by its intellectual impulses, 



176 THE "WORLD OP MIND. 

must seek to know all things, and it must aim to do 
all things, because in its nature it is a force that has 
no consciousness of limit or prohibition. Just as mat- 
ter gains speed and momentum while it is falling to- 
ward its parent mass, so Mind gains speed and mo- 
mentum every moment as it is rising toward univer- 
sal truth. 

441. The satisfaction or acquiescence which arises 
from the inspection of a complicated machine when its 
adjustments are understood and when its productive 
powers are witnessed, is vivid and of a peculiar kind, 
especially when it is the inventor who looks upon his 
realized idea. The machine, life-like as it is, stands 
forth the imbodiment of his own mind : he does not 
regard it so much as success achieved in a difficult en- 
terprise, nor does lie care to reckon upon it as a source 
of advantage to himself, for it is far more — it is the 
clear expression of thought ; it is thought become pal- 
pable and visible, and made efficient for its destined 
purposes. 

442. The very contrast between the solidity of the 
materials — the massive iron, the steel, the brass — tons, 
perhaps, of metal — and the reason which these sub- 
stances now imbody, this contrast enhances much the 
pleasure with which the machine is contemplated. 
Vegetable, and, much more, animal organizations, con- 
ceal the life which they include ; for this life so melts 
into and so commingles itself with the fluids, the pulps, 
the semisolids, that the two lose themselves the one 
in the other ; the living body is at once soul and pal- 
pable substance — it is one being, apparently homoge- 
neous in its constituents. 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIE RESULTS. 177 

443. Not so the machine ; for in this instance rea- 
son on the one side, and the hardest and most imprac- 
ticable materials on the other side, stand before us in 
a forced combination, and there is no amalgamating 
element that should blend the two, hiding the one in 
the other. Of all the modes in which human reason 
symbolizes or gives expression to itself, a perfect ma- 
chine, in productive movement, is at once the most ab- 
rupt and the most perfect. The despotic force of mind 
as related to matter speaks out in this case, and sub- 
mits itself to no softenings of its meaning. The un- 
instructed spectator of such a work looks at the hard 
material as standing foremost in his view, while he 
dimly descries the principle as if it were couching 
within the intricacies of the structure. But the in- 
structed spectator sees in the same mass the mind, the 
reason, foremost, and the material in the rear ; he looks 
at it as a vanquished resistance, which, after an ardu- 
ous struggle, and in the use of much strategy, has been 
taught its lesson of implicit and unfailing obedience. 
How arduous this struggle of Mind with hard matter 
has been, those only can well imagine who have spent 
years upon this field. 

444. We have just now said that the human mind, 
in following the leadings of mathematical abstraction, 
and again in mastering the philosophy of the material 
universe, establishes the fact of its homogeneousness 
with the Supreme Creative Reason. But on the path 
of constructive invention, man, who is at once the de- 
signer and the workman, finds, if he will but see it, a 
different kind of evidence of the accordance of his own 
mind with the all-provident Mind above him. This 

H 2 



178 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

evidence springs from that copious and marvelously 
exact provision which has been made, both in the ele- 
mentary or chemical principles of the material world, 
and in that endless variety of natural substances which 
are required for meeting the occasion and for surmount- 
ing the difficulties incident to the labors of mechanical 
o 

invention. This is a large subject, and to adduce in- 
stances would fill volumes. 

445. A machine can not be effective — it will not go 
unless in its parts and movements it is in harmony — 
perfectly so, as well with mathematical theorems as 
with mechanical laws. A complicated machine must 
be an expression of those very same principles which 
govern the celestial system ; it may be called an epit- 
ome of the mechanism of the heavens. Such as are 
suns and planets, such as are those binary systems of 
the remotest sky, such, with a severe exactitude in 
principle, is this machine, or it will not work. 

446. A structure of this sort involves also a con- 
formity with some among the multifarious properties 
of all known substances. On this ground, therefore, 
again, it is an expression of that preordained harmony 
which connects the finite mind with the Infinite Intel- 
ligence. 

447. This parallelism or co-ordination, which thus 
presents itself as existing between the finite and the 
infinite reason, includes one other element of accord- 
ance, but it is one for which we fail to find an unex- 
ceptionable form of expression. Yet, if due allowance 
be made for the imperfection — unavoidable — of lan- 
guage, then we should say that the material world, 
with its vegetable and animal species, is the expres- 



INTELLECTUAL EMOTIONS AND THEIR RESULTS. 179 

sion not merely of perfect reason in its contrivances, 
nor merely of beneficence in its (apparent) purpose, but 
also of an attribute analogous to this impulse of the 
human mind of which now we are speaking, namely, 
the desire to imbody the conceptions of reason in act- 
ual organizations, and to see imbodied whatever may 
be conceived of as possible and good. 

448. This same constructive impulse, of which only 
the most obvious products, such as tools and machines, 
have here been mentioned, shows its energy in many 
other departments of human labor. All those social, 
commercial, and political combinations, all those ar- 
rangements for the orderly transaction of business, pri- 
vate or public, all codes of law and schemes of polity, 
by means of which the wills and the interests of indi- 
vidual men are reduced to system, and are made to 
conduce to the greatest good of the many — all such con- 
trivances and schemes of order, whether tangible or not 
so, are instances coming under the same general desig- 
nation as products of the constructive faculty and the 
constructive impulse. 

449. The mechanical inventor, laboring amid the 
roar and din of furnaces and forges, the Marlborough, 
the Napoleon, the Nelson, the Wellington, laboring 
amid the roar and din of battle, and the legislator in 
his closet or at the council-board, are all, in their sev- 
eral spheres, employing nearly the same intellectual 
powers, and these powers vivified by nearly the same 
intellectual impulses. The differences which distin- 
guish them are much less in the elements than in the 
motives, and in those passions of a secondary kind 
which come to cluster around occupations so dis- 
similar. 



180 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

450. In this section we have thus named what ap- 
pear to be the leading or the most elementary of those 
impulses which, coming to bear upon the human in- 
tellect, give it their own direction, and impart to it not 
merely a never wearied activity, but a constantly ac- 
celerating force. 

451. What, then, is the aggregate product? An 
answer in full to this question must be made to em- 
brace every thing (short of that which belongs to the 
moral element of human nature) that constitutes the 
difference between the nations of western Europe and 
the aborigines of the Australian continent. 

452. But now, when we come to look into the vast 
mass of what might be adduced in illustration of the 
immeasurable prerogatives of civilization, with its arts, 
its science, its philosophy, and when we trace these 
great products of Mind to their source in the constant 
elements of human nature, we are confronted with the 
perplexing fact, brought to view as it is by the com- 
parison above stated, that these elements, these in- 
born energies, give evidence of their existence only in 
what must be regarded as exceptive instances. Take 
the human family — all races and in all times — and 
then the million to a few have lived and perished in 
the unknowing, the unthinking, the comfortless, and 
the precarious condition of a savage or of a semi-bar- 
barous condition, certainly destitute of science and 
philosophy. 

453. This fact, putting out oi view just now what- 
ever explications it might admit of on moral or theo- 
logical grounds, demands some attention. 



CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF KEASON. 181 



XIII. 

CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTELLECTUAL 
FACULTIES. 

454. It must by no means be imagined that man 
has achieved the great things which he has actually 
accomplished in science and in art, as if it were by 
breaking over his appointed bounds, or as if by an am- 
bitious violence done to his nature. We must not 
suppose that the heights of philosophy have -been 
scaled by man in defiance of the law of his being. 
This can not be thought ; but if not, then we are con- 
fronted with the fact that those powers of mind which 
are rudimental in human nature, and upon the devel- 
opment of which the well-being of man individually 
and socially so much depends, are so lodged in his 
constitution, or are so conditioned there, that the prob- 
ability of their ever being developed and coming into 
act are, at the best, only equal to the contrary prob- 
ability. 

455. If, as we have just now said, the history of 
the human family, in all times and in all lands, were 
to be summed up, and a report were to be prepared 
which might be received as the statistics of intellec- 
tual development, it would thence appear that this de- 
velopment has been the exception more than the rule. 
A development of some one of these faculties alone 
has been less rare, but still the slumber of all has 



182 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

been, if we reckon the human race in the way of a 
census, the condition of the many in all times. 

456. On this ground, then, the contrast between 
human nature and the animal orders around us is 
marked and is extreme, and it is of a kind which it 
would be unphilosophical to dismiss as if it had no 
deep meaning, or as if it did not indicate, nay, con- 
spicuously display a fundamental principle in the struc- 
ture of the human mind. 

457. Throughout all species in the animal orders 
Mind invariably completes its intention ; it makes full 
use of its powers, neither more nor less ; and it does 
so with an undeviating regard to the law of its struc- 
ture in each species, and it does so from age to age, 
unchangeably ; but it is not so with man. 

458. To a certain extent, this anomalous condition 
of the human system may be shown to conform itself 
to law ; or, in other words, it has its apparent reason, 
and it justifies itself in the result as affecting the wel- 
fare of the social system at large, as for instance : 

459. When we bring into view a civilized and a 
cultivated community, including its several orders, the 
under and the upper, the more and the less educated 
— the laborers mechanically, the laborers intellectu- 
ally — those who command their time, and those whose 
time is every day bartered for bread, then such facts 
as these are easily seen to belong to the structure of 
human nature, as intended to undergo, not a solitary, 
but a social development. 

460. The first of these obvious facts is this, that 
the intellectual emotions, and. the tastes, and the ten- 
dencies which concrete about them, are bestowed by 



CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF EEASON. 183 

nature upon the social mass in far greater profusion 
than are those intellectual faculties or powers of reason 
which might yield any appreciable product. For one 
mind that is endowed as well with the power as with 
the emotional taste, a hundred minds, or a thousand, 
or many thousands, possess the feeling, the sensibil- 
ity, the communicable soul which bring them within 
the influence of this, the gifted one in ten thousand. 

461. The reason of this unequal distribution of the 
feeling and of the power it is not difficult to find. The 
product, the commodity that is needed for the benefit 
of the many, is of a communicable kind ; it is what 
may be conveyed and transmitted, and gazed at, and 
used, and admired, and repeated, and copied, and in- 
definitely diffused. When light is needed, it is enough 
that one flame should be kindled, which will enkindle 
others, or will itself shine upon all. There would 
plainly be a waste if intellectual powers were as com- 
mon as intellectual tastes, or aptitudes to use and en- 
joy the products of that power. 

462. This unequal relationship of the faculty and 
the aptitude to use and enjoy has this further mean- 
ing, that it tends greatly to enhance the motive which 
bears upon the minds of the few gifted individuals. 
The gifted man, unless he be strangely anchoretic in 
his dispositions, knows and feels that in his solitude 
he is laboring for the many ; that his excellent achieve- 
ments will be accepted, and prized, and used by his 
contemporaries, and perhaps even by the men of dis- 
tant times. Here, then, a provision is made for throw- 
ing in an intensity of productive force upon the faculty 
whence the needed product is to arise. 



184 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

463. Another fact which presents itself as a law, 
determining the unequal distribution of intellectual 
powers and tastes, is this, that those which are the 
most largely bestowed are of that kind which are most 
in request, while the more rare gifts are those which 
may be rare without detriment to the commonwealth. 

464. Among the various products of reason, that 
one kind which is the most infallibly communicable, 
without chance of detriment or deduction, either in 
quantity or in quality, is mathematical truth. That 
which has been achieved (to look only to modern times) 
by Leibnitz and Newton, by Pascal and Euler, by La- 
grange and La Place, has long ago become the prop- 
erty, whole and entire, of the mathematical world ; 
nothing has been lost or damaged in the transmission 
and dispersion of these treasures, any more than the 
solar beams are damaged when they speed themselves 
onward daily from Asia to Europe, from Europe to 
America. 

465. That loftiest order of mathematical intelligence 
which should be spoken of as mathematical genius, and 
to which it is given to make discoveries, and to lead 
the human mind forward into an advanced position — 
this high faculty is, perhaps, the most rare of all in- 
tellectual distinctions. Upon this table-land of Mind 
the names of those who, in the course of the thirty 
historic ages, have set up their standard and left their 
monument, are not more than six or eisht. 

466. Meantime, enough of mathematical intelligence, 
and feeling, and taste — often of a high, although sec- 
ondary order — has developed itself in all cultured na- 
tions. There has been no lack, at any time, of the dif- 



CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF REASON. 185 

fusive medium ; there has been no scarcity of minds 
thoroughly accomplished for the labor of sustaining, 
and extending, and teaching, and applying the higher 
truths in this department. In this instance, then, we 
do not venture far in saying that we see the reason of 
this unequal distribution of powers and faculties ; we 
seem here to discern a law, and to trace it in its opera- 
tion as beneficial to all. 

467. On the field of physical philosophy the lead- 
ing minds — the discoverers — have been more numer- 
ous. It is not that the products of thought in this 
region are not communicable when once they have been 
fully realized ; but here there are various departments, 
and therefore a division of labor must take place, both 
on account of the extent of the tasks to be achieved, 
and because these tasks are such as demand peculiar 
tastes and faculties in those who undertake them. 

468. Physical philosophy is pursued on the separ- 
ate fields of celestial mechanism, chemistry, geology, 
physiology, both vegetable and animal. It will not be 
found that any one mind stands first in each of these 
pursuits. A mind that grasps the whole is likely to 
be less eminent in discovery than in classification. 
The man of all sciences is logical rather than explora- 
tive. Such was Lord Bacon's function, and such was 
the position he occupied toward the encyclopedia of 
modern philosophy — he indicated a method. 

469. Mechanical invention and the multifarious 
products of the constructive faculty are indeed readily 
communicable, and they soon become the common prop- 
erty of nations ; therefore a highly-gifted few might la- 
bor for the benefit of all. But again, on this ground 



186 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

as in physical science, the tasks are very many and 
dissimilar, and the species of ability that is applicable 
to them must be as various. The advancement of na- 
tions in civilization and in its arts requires a copious 
supply of inventive and constructive genius ; and, in 
fact, minds endowed in this manner are born in abund- 
ance, and they find, individually, their particular patli 
waiting for them. 

470. As to those products of mind the conveyance 
of which is wholly dependent upon language — such as 
poetry, and prose too of the imaginative or rhetorical 
order — they, of all its products, are the most restricted 
in their means of transmission. Poetry can never be 
made the property of all nations, for it is not translat- 
able. The world has never yet seen a translated poem 
or a translated oration, for the best of these attempts 
has been such that the poet or orator would have died 
of vexation if he could have seen his mind reflected in 
such a mirror. Every people must receive from its 
own sons, by the liberality of nature, its own Homer, 
and Sophocles, and Demosthenes ; its own Virgil and 
Horace ; its own Dante ; its own Shakspeare and 
Milton ; its own Goethe ; and so, in fact, it has always 
been. Again, then, we catch a glimpse of law, and see 
it in beneficial operation. 

471. But much less clearness attends our course 
when we go in search of some general principle be- 
yond this point. How is it that the human mind ac- 
complishes its destiny on the field of reason only in so 
exceptional and in so precarious a manner ? 

472. It is not always true, even when a community 
has passed beyond the semi-barbarous condition, and 



CONTINGENT DEVELOPMENT OF EEASON. 187 

when there has come to exist within it a class raised 
above the urgent necessities of animal life, that the 
intellectual faculties expand and develop themselves 
spontaneously. Many nations have passed onward 
through centuries — they have risen, and flourished, and 
disappeared — enjoying, to a certain extent, the fruits 
of civilization, and yet never putting forth, as from 
themselves, the higher products of philosophy, or of 
poetry, or of the fine arts. 

473. Some very peculiar conditions, attaching to the 
physical temperament of the race — certain occult ex- 
cellences in the national stock — seem to be indispens- 
able to the development of the higher faculties. And 
yet, when once we have actually obtained the products 
of these faculties in philosophy and in art, they are 
such as may be conveyed to and made available for 
the benefit of races that never have, and probably never 
could have, created them for themselves. Man, as one 
species all the world over, proves himself to possess 
powers of mind which, in fact, do not expand except 
under conditions the most rare. 

474. Certain it is that the intellectual faculties in 
human nature are not developed in obedience to any 
such laws as those which determine the exercise of the 
constructive or other faculties in the animal orders. 
Law, or, in other words, those fixed conditions under 
which animal life fulfills its destiny, can not be imag- 
ined to take effect otherwise than with universality as 
to each species of animal. But with the human spe- 
cies there is neither this universality in the operation 
of any such laws, nor is there any uniformity in the 
products when these actually appear. 



188 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

475. When we speak of the constant and uniform 
development of reason in the animal orders as exhibit- 
ed in their constructive labors especially, we must in- 
tend this — that the intellectual volition follows in a 
track that is marked out for it by nature : the animal 
structure is such that, in given circumstances, the vo- 
litions will be invariably such and such. The uni- 
versality and the uniformity of these products indicate, 
or we might say demonstrate, the presence and the un- 
failing constancy of the laws which rule the animal 
mind. 

476. Shall we then be warranted in affirming the 
converse conclusion, which is this, that, where there is 
neither universality nor uniformity in the development 
of reason, there is present no law or no determinative 
influence to which reason is subjected? Are we safe 
in assuming, on the ground of these anomalous facts, 
that reason in the individual man follows no direction 
from any source that is anterior to itself? In other 
terms, our hypothetic conclusion would be this : that 
the human mind gives law to itself ; that it is its only 
law ; and that, as to the exercise of its highest facul- 
ties, it is absolutely initiative. 

477. Abstaining from a positive assumption of this 
hypothesis as if it were a demonstrated truth, we take 
rather the safer course of following reason some way 
into its recesses, and of noting the mode of its proced- 
ure in certain definite instances. Among these in- 
stances, the one which is the most easily followed is 
that which has place when an interaction is going on 
between the intellectual faculties and the instrument or 
engine of all mental operations, namely, Language. 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 189 



XIV. 

LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 

478. The primary purpose of language as the means 
of communication — mind with mind — subserves a pur- 
pose scarcely less important in the development of the 
intellect when it is employed as the instrument of 
thought by the individual reason. Single words, and 
certain constant and conventional combinations of 
them, are the tools of thought, and without the aid of 
these its processes must stop short at a rudimental 
stage. 

479. In relation to different intellectual processes 
language is a more or a less indispensable instrument. 
It yields also an aid more or less necessary to differ- 
ent minds, according to their original structure, to 
their abstractive power, and to the extent of culture 
they may have received. But there are certain opera- 
tions (as we shall see), in carrying forward which it 
can scarcely be imagined that even the strongest 
minds, advantaged by the most perfect discipline, 
could dispense with this assistance, or could think to 
any good purpose otherwise than as leaning, from 
step to step, upon words — phrases — propositions. 

480. Language, to become fully available for these 
purposes, must be held at command under conditions 
which should be understood. The mind, while em- 
ploying this, its instrument, must have set itself free, in 



190 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

some degree, from the thraldom of words and phrases. 
This emancipation takes place, to some extent, in the 
course of the most ordinary education, but in the full- 
est manner only when culture has been carried for- 
ward into adult years, or otherwise in rare instances 
of native powers of mind of a high order. 

481. Soon after its awakening in the midst of a 
world of objects, pressing upon it through the senses, 
the human infant, while listening to the voices that 
soothe or that startle the ear, is yielding itself to a 
process, in the course of which the world of words 
comes to adhere, point after point, to the world of ob- 
jects ; and these adhesions, multiplying every day, 
and becoming more and more firm or indissoluble, are 
at length so thoroughly riveted or welded that the 
union could scarcely be more intimate if, in fact, the 
mother tongue were born with the mind itself. If the 
human family had known only one language, it would 
scarcely have been possible for us to entertain the sup- 
position that words are nothing more than arbitrary 
signs, and that they might therefore have been other 
than they are. 

482. In fact, millions of men pass through their 
destined course of years with no other consciousness 
than this. Thought and language have never been 
sundered, in all their experience, from infancy to age. 
So much intellectual action as may consist with this 
fixity is possible to minds thus conditioned, but- not 
more. It is the function of education to break up, in 
a greater or less degree, this rude congestion, and to 
give to the mind its proper supremacy in relation to 
its implements. 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 191 

483. The teacher makes a commencement in this 
process when he finds occasion to revise the child's 
glossary, substituting one term for another wherever a 
faulty fitting has taken place as to the meaning of 
words. The child, by an unconscious inductive proc- 
ess, carries forward this corrective operation for him- 
self while he listens to the promiscuous conversation 
of adults. His alert curiosity not only brings him 
into possession of a stock of convertible terms — syn- 
onyms, equivalents, and metonymic phrases — but it 
leads him to loosen himself off a little from that inti- 
mate blending of words and ideas which had taken 
place at the first. 

484. The acquisition and the actual use of one or 
more languages beside the vernacular greatly accelerates 
the process of liberation, as does also an initiation in 
those abstract sciences which demand a laying aside, 
for a time, the colloquial sense of language, and the 
taking up an artificial, or technical sense. By means 
such as these, that fixity of the connection between 
words and ideas is loosened, which is the impractica- 
ble condition of minds among the uneducated classes. 

485. And yet culture may go very far, and still it 
may leave the mind under thraldom, if not to words 
taken singly, yet to a mass of conventional and cus- 
tomary combinations of them. It is so especially with 
those minds that may be designated as the logical or 
formulative. Persons of this class think only by sen- 
tences or by clusters of words. It is less, or scarcely 
at all so, with those that are at once analytic and syn- 
thetic, inventive and creative. If words are the tools 
of thought, the same may be said of them as of those 



192 THE WOKLD OP MIND. 

implements which are wielded by the hand. The un- 
varied use, year after year, of certain implements of 
the mechanic arts so becomes a second nature to the 
artisan that there is room for the question, Which of 
the two is really the master, the workman or his tool ? 
the hand and arm obey the tool as much as this obeys 
the muscular force. 

486. A very large proportion of all ordinary dis- 
course, public and private, follows in the track of con- 
ventional forms, which are scarcely less determinative 
as to the movements of thought than are the rails to 
the course of the train which speeds itself upon them 
with more of the appearance of spontaneous force than 
of its reality, and yet this despotism of conventional 
speech is not to be complained of, for by the means of 
it the social system holds its onward course with a 
steady momentum, and it avoids the peril of a road 
which otherwise it might choose for itself. Certain 
utterances, as well of feeling as of opinion, are (to 
change the figure) stereotyped, and by means of these 
accredited forms a tacit censorship is brought to bear 
upon society, much to its advantage. The individual 
man, when he accepts the aid of certain modes of par- 
lance, yields himself unconsciously to a process of re- 
vision which retrenches much and amends much that 
might offend all ears if uttered in its native form. 

487. Thus far Mind and its implement, language, 
exercise a divided empire, or they rule the man in al- 
ternating moments. But the development of the hu- 
man faculties upon higher ground can take place only 
when the rightful supremacy of the one and the due 
subserviency of the other of these two powers has 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 193 

been firmly established, and has become the habit of 
the reason. 

488. In listening — so far as it may indeed be pos- 
sible to listen in such cases — to the extemporaneous 
discourse of public speakers, to whom exercises of this 
sort have become only too easy, one may follow the 
"law of thought" from the end of one sentence to the 
beginning of the next, and from the closing sentence 
of one paragraph to the initial sentence of another, and 
one may clearly discern what that principle of sequen- 
cy is which gives law to the speaker's mind as he 
glides along upon the worn tram-road of accustomed 
utterances. Exercises of this sort might well enough 
be adduced in illustration of the doctrine that a "law 
of suggestion" of some kind rules supreme in the world 
of Mind. 

489. But let it be supposed that a speaker's course 
of thought is suddenly influenced by some cross cur- 
rent, or by some incidental motive which comes to 
combine itself with, and to give a varied character to 
the discourse. In this case there is before us a much 
more complicated phenomenon. The mind, subject, 
as it is assumed to be, to its customary " law of as- 
sociation," is here seen to be serving two masters ; it 
is pulled forward, now by the right-hand force, now by 
the left-hand, and yet it contrives to hold on its way 
between the two. 

490. That it should be able to do so is perhaps 
conceivable, for such is the velocity of our mental op- 
erations that we may suppose even an ordinary mind 
to be capable of this rapid alternation between two 
distinct courses of thought, and yet that it should be 

I 



194 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

able also to preserve some coherence, and to give con- 
sistency to both in its flow of language. 

491. There are, however, products of the human in- 
tellect of a far more complicated order than those we 
have now been supposing, and to which it is exceed- 
ingly difficult — granting it to be possible — to apply a 
suggestive theory of any kind. In yielding itself to a 
law of suggestion, or to two or three such laws, run- 
ning on parallel to each other, it either obeys these 
influences according to their relative forces, or itself 
rules them : the ultimate product is either, mathemat- 
ically, such as the two suggestions make it, or it is 
such as these make it, controlled, not by another sug- 
gestion, but by the Mind — uncontrolled, and in act a 
law to itself. 

492. Whatever may be the instances which we 
should adduce in support of an hypothesis that might 
seem to be applicable to the problem before us, they 
ought to be relied upon always with a degree of re- 
serve as being in some sense ambiguous ; for, when- 
ever a question arises concerning the existence or the 
non-existence of an elementary principle or a primary 
fact in nature, we surrender the very ground on which 
we wish to establish our theory if we go about to make 
it good by a course of logical reasoning. This rule 
has already been insisted upon. Instances brought 
forward in illustration of any such hypothesis should 
be appealed to only for the purpose of showing that, 
if we grant this hypothesis, then such and such facts 
become more intelligible than they can be in reject- 
ing it. 

493. Let it be that we are held to a dilemma of 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 195 

this sort — we must accept an inconceivable supposi- 
tion of one kind, or we must yield assent to an incon- 
ceivable supposition of another kind ; the difference 
between the two being this, that the one accords with 
our consciousness, while the other contradicts it. 

494. Among the highest products of the human 
mind, those must take a foremost place in which sev- 
eral elements, each governed by its own law, each hav- 
ing its own conditions, are so combined as to yield a 
uniform, symmetrical, and congruous result — a result 
in which no violence has been done to any propriety, 
and in which nothing is redundant, nothing is want- 
ing. A product which actually satisfies these condi- 
tions, difficult as they are, may safely be adduced as 
an exemplification of the structure and functions of 
Mind, or as a proof of what it is capable of when put- 
ting forth its powers at the best. 

495. Products of the human mind may be regarded 
as admirable either absolutely in themselves, or con- 
sidered in relation to the peculiar circumstances under 
which they may have appeared. A labored oration is 
what it is after the toils of weeks and the hours of 
many nights have given it the faultless perfection 
which at length it exhibits ; or an oration — and per- 
haps it is not inferior to this first — may have burst 
from the speaker at the moment, and under the inspi- 
ration of some extraordinary occasion. In this latter 
case it would surely seem to deserve a higher praise 
than in the former. 

496. In such an imagined instance of extemporane- 
ous eloquence, the orator — at the bar or in the senate 
— brings up to the occasion first his main purpose or 



196 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

his political or legal doctrine ; then he brings his own 
habituated flow of language — his style and manner ; 
then he brings his copious treasure of images, analo- 
gies, tropes, and figures — a never exhausted stock. 
With all these various materials in hand, we may sup- 
pose that he is able to make them available from in- 
stant to instant, as he goes on ; and they are thus 
available — let us grant it — because certain laws of 
suggestion, which are already familiar to him, and are 
prompt to present themselves, bring forward the very 
article which best fits the occasion, each kind taking 
its turn, and each giving place to another, when it 
ought, with electric rapidity. 

497. But now, while this evolution of commingled 
thought is in full flow, an incident — unlooked for — 
such as the suddenly manifested feeling of those whom 
he is addressing, and whose concurrence he is labor- 
ing to secure, induces the speaker, in a moment, to 
shift his ground of argument, to modify his doctrine, 
and to divert from his first purpose and to aim at any 
other. 

498. At this critical moment, then, there comes to 
bear upon the mind a new law of suggestion — a train 
of ideas not at first included in the fabric of thought, 
and this must now be combined with it ; yet it must 
so be done as to avoid abruptness or the appearance 
of incoherence. The then-present trains of thought 
must be severally seized anew, and must be trimmed 
and adjusted, and the fabric must offer to the admiring 
eyes of those around a new pattern, a new color, and, 
nevertheless, it must be a perfect work. 

499. The achievement of a task so arduous as this 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPERATIONS. 197 

(and to achieve it with brilliant success) seems to de- 
mand these two conditions, and the one of them as in- 
dispensably needed as the other. The first is this : 
that copious and various materials should so range 
themselves within prospect of the mind as to be avail- 
able at the instant when they are needed ; the second 
condition is this : that a disposing power superior to 
these materials, and restricted by no conditions, and 
shackled by no laws of sequency, shall hold the cen- 
tral place, while it freely gives law to all. 

500. Yet may not this hypothetic supremacy be 
itself resolvable into another law of a higher order, 
which comes in to take effect over the head of all oth- 
ers? This may be imagined as possible, though it 
be at variance with our consciousness of intellectual 
action. 

501. We turn to another instance, and it shall be 
one that is familiar to every English reader. Let it 
be the "Elegy written in a Country Church-yard." 
In this highly-finished production three separate ele- 
ments are combined in one harmonious result, and they 
are so combined and so perfectly blended as that each, 
in turn, might be regarded as the chief, or the sole 
purpose that had been in the poet's view, and to which 
he had subordinated the other two. Each is precise- 
ly what it should be irrespectively of the others ; each 
is as if it were principal, and each is as if it were sub- 
sidiary. 

502. In this Elegy there is, first, a deep moral in- 
tention ; there is the doctrine of human life in its som- 
bre aspect, and such as it shows itself to be, not in 
king's palaces, but in a rural church-yard. The sec- 



198 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

ond of these elements, every where present, and sub- 
sidiary to the principal intention, and yet independent 
of it, is a delicious series of images — pictures— drawn 
from the purest and most agreeable sources, and each 
presented in the purple light — the subdued splendor 
of the poet's own brilliant and chastened fancy. The 
third of these elements, again subservient to the first 
and to the second, and yet governed in the most abso- 
lute manner by its own laws, is the faultless rhythm 
of the composition — its soft cadences — the music of 
its highly artificial collocation of syllables. The verse 
is as if it were allowed to be master of the sense and 
soul of the poetry ; the imagery is as if the poet's only 
aim had been to yield a luxurious hour to the intel- 
lectual voluptuary ; the moral is such as the preacher 
would willingly make his own, and render into his dry 
didactic style. 

503. Nevertheless, this Elegy is not an alternation 
of verse, and of imagery, and of doctrine, for it is, 
throughout, one product ; every where, and in each line 
apart, it is true to the requirements of each of its con- 
stituent principles. 

504. The characteristic of a production of this or- 
der is this, that it contains no instances of an ill-man- 
aged compromise either of the sense to the sound, or 
of the sound to the sense ; there is no putting in of 
images which subserve no purpose but that of decora- 
tion. On the contrary, an artist of inferior ability 
quickly betrays his want of skill and the low rate of 
his disposing power: his materials kick against his 
main intention ; the moral gives way to the obduracy 
of the versification ; and often the humiliating fact ob- 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPEEATIONS. 199 

trades itself, that a mere rhyme has been allowed to 
override the versifier's serious purpose, or to drive him 
from his ground. 

505. The function of Language, when a composi- 
tion such as the above is referred to is evolving itself 
from the poet's mind, is to hold all the materials in so- 
lution. Language, with the entireness of its treasures, 
constitutes the medium — we may say, the fluid mass 
within which all materials are brought forward to be 
judged of, and within which the inchoation of thought 
may freely take place and may be gradually advanced 
until the last requirements of a fastidious taste have 
been satisfied. The poet's intellectual culture has at 
once brought all the funds of his native language be- 
fore him, and it has also set him free from the fixity 
of words in their connection with ideas or feelings. 
He has its wealth at his command, and he has a per- 
fect mastery over it. 

506. A copious and highly elaborated language may 
thus be regarded as the means or the field of that 
sovereignty which we are assuming to be the distinc- 
tion of the human mind, and apart from which no 
products beyond the merest rudiments do in fact ever 
appear. Laws of association or suggestion avail in 
any process which runs upon a single line, but they 
can avail little or nothing when several of these lines 
of suggestion, independent one of the other, are to be 
wrought into a tissue that shall be uniform, homoge- 
neous, and coherent. 

507. On a dead level as to its social and political 
condition, a people may make good progress in the 
arts of life and in the exterior things of civilization : 



200 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

that is, it may advance so far as it may go under the 
guidance of rudimental laws of intellectual action — 
laws of suggestion. But with a people that is thus 
in thraldom under the passive principles of the mental 
constitution, the sciences are only empirical arts ; phi- 
losophy is a fantastic chimera ; art is monstrous ; re- 
ligion is a myth, and a means of despotism to a few; 
the polity of the people is such an organization of the 
mass as forbids individual development. Such a com- 
munity may be believed to have attained its highest 
condition in a remote time, history does not tell us 
how or when ; and as to its after-periods, history has 
allotted no pages to its memorials. 

508. Whether it is a race that has created its lan- 
guage, or the language the race, is a problem toward 
the solution of which little progress has hitherto been 
made ; nor does it belong to our subject. But this is 
certain, that, apart from a language which is at once 
copious and plastic, and abundant in abstractions, the 
thinking of a people is thinking in mass ; it is not in- 
dividual thought. Individual men, the people's heroes, 
may have been great in action, but there has been no 
intellectual greatness sporadic among the people. There 
has been no literature rich in biogi*aphies, and nothing 
among its records which it is not a weariness to pe- 
ruse, and a worse labor to attempt to remember. 

509. Intellectual development, with its true philos- 
ophy, its demonstrated science, its fine arts, and its 
refined civilization, is, in a word, the expansion of un- 
conditioned thought, and therefore it is exceptional ; 
for, if it were conditioned, it would be universal and 
uniform in its products. 



LANGUAGE AS BELATED TO MENTAL OPEEATIONS. 201 

510. Exceptional as to races and as to times, such 
it appears when the human family is looked at in a 
comprehensive manner ; and then if, from an elevated 
position, where our prospect is wide, we move down 
and look around us in any private circle, the same ex- 
ceptional condition presents itself as characteristic of 
the intellectual development of those around us. A 
mental condition including nothing more than what is 
proper to human nature in the abstract is, in fact, the 
rare distinction o± one mind in a thousand. 

511. "We are not supposing an instance of extra- 
ordinary productive faculties, or a mental force of great 
intensity and great radius, but are thinking only of 
that sort of disposing power in the mind which we at 
once recognize and bow to at the moment when an in- 
dividual so endowed steps upon the stage of society. 

512. What we have here in view is not (need we 
say so) the arrogant willfulness — not the stentorian 
egotism of the man who is " wiser in his own conceit 
than seven that can render a reason," nor is it the 
honest bull-headed determination of one who so main- 
tains his opinion that the modest and timid give ground 
before him in argument : the mind of power we have 
now in view might claim its descent, not from Samuel 
Johnson, but from Francis Bacon. 

513. Let the philosopher who assures us that Mind 
is invariably governed by the law of its idiosyncrasy, 
and of habit, and of education, and of professional oc- 
cupation — by laws of taste and of moral tendency — 
let him take his seat at a table around which the 
choicest men of a neighborhood or of a metropolis are 
assembled, and where all the liberty of speech is en- 

I 2 



202 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

joyed which is conceivable or which can be desirable: 
this sage, as he sits a silent listener to the rattle of 
discourse, will be glad to confirm himself in his doc- 
trine as he notes his pertinent instances, and feels that 
he should seldom err, after a time, in predicting the 
deliverances of each mind on any given subject. The 
law of each mind is indeed, as he says, ." each mind's 
law:" it is a law never, in fact, violated, although it 
may often be deflected by its collision with other minds. 

514. But let us imagine that chance has brought 
into this party, not a " celebrity" in science, not a man 
who has long ago won for himself a " European repu- 
tation," but a mind which is sovereign in relation to 
its own materials — to its own methods and processes 
of intellection, and supreme in relation to "fixed se- 
quences" of every kind. A rare mind indeed, and yet 
it is in no sense monstrous ; it is not supernatural; it 
is rare, as related to the masses of a cultured com- 
munity, in about the same proportion as that in which 
the cultured races of the human family are few com- 
pared with the innumerable millions of the semi-bar- 
barous and the savage. 

515. In what, then, consists this supremacy or this 
disposing power, which exhibits itself in combining va- 
rious materials with relation to a foreseen product ? In 
search of an answer we may follow it out a little farther. 

516. The company above supposed includes, let us 
imagine, men of different nations: there is the Ger- 
man, the Italian, the Frenchman, and there is a south- 
ern and a northern sample of the Anglo-Saxon type, 
recent from the United States. Each of the guests 
who takes a part in promiscuous discourse upon the 



LANGUAGE AS EELATED TO MENTAL OPEEATIONS. 203 

subjects of the day — the interests and reputation of 
nations, shows a well-bred regard to the national feel- 
ings and prejudices, and to the presumed opinions and 
professions of his neighbors, right and left, and yet in 
doing so he betrays his wish to do it : he fails in the 
skill of combination, and he fails in a way that is 
analogous to the mishaps of the blundering poet who, 
when he can not bring rhyme and metre to obey his 
principal meaning, leaves his principal meaning to shift 
for itself, or to be quite set aside by the obdurate re- 
quirements of versification. These several speakers 
insert, at places in their utterances, whatever of con- 
cession, or of oblique apology, or of varnish they may 
wish to blend with the genuine expression of their in- 
dividual opinions. 

517. It is not so with the one speaker to whom all 
eyes and ears are sure to be directed by the time he 
has uttered twenty words. The materials which he 
deals with, and which he converts to his purpose with 
an artless ease and a ready fluency, are such as these. 
There is, first, whatever of fact or of principle is direct- 
ly pertinent to the subject in hand — political, statisti- 
cal, moral, ecclesiastical, as the case may be ; secondly, 
there is the known or surmised opinions, interests, 
prejudices, professions of those present ; and, thirdly, 
there is his own individual tendencies — his idiosyn- 
crasies, of which he is at least as well aware as he is 
of those of other men, but over which he exercises a 
constant repressive control. Now these materials, 
various as they are, do not come up in the speaker's 
discourse as diverse patches here and there inserted, 
for the entire fabric of his utterances is homogeneous : 



204 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

it is a work wherein all shades of thought — even every 
fibre of latent meaning — comes in where it should come 
in, and contributes its aid to the general effect. 

518. The plasticity of language and its copiousness 
are the indispensable condition of so nice an operation 
as this. The speaker knows how to avail himself not 
merely of its stores and of its emphatic forces, but of 
its ambiguities, its conventional evasions, its graceful 
obliquities, its dim metonymic ironies. The solid mat- 
ter of thought thrown in upon the liquid mass of lan- 
guage undergoes there a process of adjustment which, 
though it is completed in less than an instant of time, 
falls little short of being a perfect work when it reaches 
the ear in its measured yet artless cadences. 

519. An extemporaneous work of thought, such as 
that which we have now imagined, and which — al- 
though it is not of every-day occurrence — is no mir- 
acle, we regard as the last product of A Cause over 
and beyond, or above which, or anterior to it, there is 
no causality whatever. This utterance is the expo- 
nent of a Power which, in the most strict sense, is in- 
itiative : there is nothing that is either of earlier date 
or of higher position than that Power of which the 
product (in the case before us) now meets the ear. In 
listening to such an utterance, a very peculiar feeling 
ensues ; for, instead of being invited to accept the best 
we can get of the worn matter of customary discourse, 
we now, with a sort of galvanic consciousness, feel 
that we are in close contact with the Power of Mind. 
Sheer thought comes home upon every mind, or upon 
every mind that is not itself too much worn, and 
wasted, and spent to admit of such a consciousness. 



EELATIVE VALUE OF CEETAIN TEEMS. 205 

520. A motive of reverence toward some metaphysic 
axiom may incline us to reject as delusive this vivid 
spontaneous consciousness of touching upon a First 
Cause on occasions of this sort, nor will there be want- 
ing the semblance of reason to support us while we are 
endeavoring to choke our instinctive convictions with 
accredited academic formulas. 



XV. 

EELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TEEMS. 

521. At this stage of our course, and before enter- 
ing upon subjects of an entirely different kind, it will 
be well to assign to their places certain terms and 
phrases which are customarily employed in speaking 
of the intellectual faculties. The words and the modes 
of speaking now referred to may retain their places in 
colloquial parlance, for convenience' sake, if only we 
remember that no scientific value attaches to them, 
and that they are employed much in the same way as 
we allow ourselves to speak of astronomical phenom- 
ena — not as they are, but as they seem to be. 

522. The set of words, and the usual expressions 
which we have now to dispose of, carry with them this 
apparent meaning : that the mind— or, to speak re- 
strictively, the human mind — is a concrete of various 
powers and separate faculties, which are lodged side 
by side, or in an upper and under relative position, 
within the thinking substance to which they cohere. 
It is thus that the "Will" is spoken of as if it were 
a faculty distinct; and so the "Memory," and the 



206 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

"power of Attention," and the "faculty of Abstrac- 
tion" or of Analysis; and so the "Association of 
ideas" is the mode or law of a faculty, and so the 
" Imagination." 

523. This loose and popular mode of speaking has 
prevailed so much, and it has continued in use so long, 
partly because intellectual philosophy is an open field, 
trodden by a promiscuous crowd of intelligent persons, 
who, though they have never trained themselves to 
analytic thought, yet believe themselves competent to 
discourse concerning "mental science." 

524. But the tendency to divide the mind into " fac- 
ulties" or separate organs has taken its rise from cer- 
tain anatomical and physiological habitudes or pre- 
occupations on the part of some who have led the way 
in this department. 

525. Sensation (in the five senses) is departmental 
undoubtedly, so far as it comes under the cognizance 
of the anatomist and the physiologist. This fact may 
seem to give support to the hypothesis of a depart- 
mental structure in the mind itself; and then, when, 
after using the scalpel and saw, we come to lift the 
osseous hemisphere from off the wondrous and unin- 
terpretable mass which it protects, there meets the 
curious eye a complicated and multiform organ, the 
several parts of which may easily be regarded as if 
they were articulate with the facts of intellectual sci- 
ence. It is easy so to think when a human brain is 
laid open in horizontal and in transverse section, and 
when all its mysteries are laid bare ; it is easier thus 
to think than it is to repel so specious a supposition. 

526. But analytic severity demands of us that, put- 



EELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TEEMS. 207 

ting away the palpable elements which the scalpel and 
the microscope bring to light, we should go into Mind 
— and nowhere else, when we are in search of Mind 
— sure of this truth, that that which is of the earth 
is earthy only. 

527. A foremost article in popular mental philoso- 
phy is "the Will," which takes its place alongside 
of other "faculties" and "powers" as one of them. 
But whatever those terms or phrases may be by means 
of which we note the difference that distinguishes the 
animal mind from vegetative life, the very same terms 
and phrases are those which offer themselves as the 
very best we can use for conveying our idea of this 
faculty, namely, " the Will ;" yet only with this dif- 
ference, that the animal mind is conscious also of the 
properties of matter, which consciousness, as we sup- 
pose, does not belong to vegetative life. 

528. Mind is not always in act either toward the 
outer world, or, introvertedly, toward its own states. 
Consciousness, perhaps, is never intermitted (unless in 
cases of disease affecting the brain) ; simple conscious- 
ness is, however, passive throughout a large proportion 
of every twenty-four hours, even with the most active 
and vigorous minds. But whenever, and in whatso- 
ever way, Mind is Mind in its own sense, then, and 
just so far as it is so, there are no terms in which we 
can speak of it which differ by a particle from those 
of which we must make use in setting forth what we 
mean by this faculty of the Will. The " Will" is 
neither more nor less than Mind itself; or, if we pre- 
fer a circumlocution, we may call it the first rudiment 
of Mind, the second rudiment being its passive con- 
sciousness toward the properties of matter. 



208 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

529. The power or faculty of Attention takes a 
separate place also in our colloquial mental philoso- 
phy. In this instance a very easy process of simpli- 
fication suffices for dispersing this hypothetic faculty. 
In by far the larger number of those instances to 
which we should apply the word attention, the mind 
determines itself toward one object among several or 
among many which at any time may come within its 
prospect, and it does so at the instigation of a motive 
or an impulse — such, for instance, as those of which 
we have already spoken, or of others of which we are 
presently to speak. In these cases no separate facul- 
ty or organ need be imagined ; what we have before 
us is Mind in act at the impulse of some of its emo- 
tions or its tastes. 

530. But beside these instances of determinative 
action — action induced or impelled by an emotion — 
attention fixes itself often upon a single object, ex- 
ternal or internal, apart from, or in the absence of any 
motive attaching to that one object rather than to oth- 
ers of the same order, and which are ranging them- 
selves on the same visible surface. If it shall be af- 
firmed that on every such occasion the actual object 
of attention does in fact possess some preferential qual- 
ity, although it may be quite inappreciable, our answer 
would be this — that the hypothesis of any such pref- 
erence is purely gratuitous, for our consciousness gives 
no support to it. On the contrary, when we pursue 
— as far as, by the severest efforts of analysis, we can 
pursue — the evolutions ot thought, we come to this 
issue, that the sovereignty of Mind in relation to its 
own states demands or consists in this unconditional 



EELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TEEMS. 209 

power to fix itself upon any one among many objects 
that lie within its range, and to pass unmotived from 
one such object to any other. 

531. When regarded from another point of view, 
this same determinative force, which is the prerogative 
of the human mind, brings before us what we mean 
when we speak of the ". faculty of abstraction." This 
is not a separate power, but a function only of Mind 
as related to some special occasion. This special oc- 
casion is that which presents itself when objects, or 
qualities, or adjuncts attaching to a concrete are re- 
quired to be set off, one from the others, by noting 
their differences. Frequently in these pages, as mat- 
ter of convenience, the colloquial phrase the " faculty 
of abstraction" has been admitted, for it would be a 
useless pedantry to abstain from the use of it ; and we 
may do so freely, if only we remember that it carries 
a popular, not a strict or scientific sense. 

532. Analysis is a product of the abstractive facul- 
ty. When differences have been noted, we set off the 
several results, whether they be two, three, or more, 
and thus the concrete has resolved itself into its con- 
stituents or its elements. 

533. But is not the " Imagination" a faculty by it- 
self? To what has been already said in the section 
on the Rudiments of Mind and in the following sec- 
tion, little need here be added in explanation of what 
we mean in affirming that the imagination is no separ- 
ate faculty, but that it is an exercise only of its rudi- 
mental power at the impulse or under the guidance of 
a particular class of emotions, or of tastes and sensi- 
bilities ? 



210 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

534. These intellectual stimulants are of various 
kinds, and they possess different degrees of intensity. 
They are yet to be spoken of, each in its place ; "but 
supposing them, or some of them, to he present, then 
the mind, when thus vivified by some sensibility of 
its own, acts upon the copious stores of its conscious- 
ness — that is to say, upon those treasured ideas and 
images derived from the external world, which, in the 
first instance, were admitted with an emotion of pleas- 
ure or of wonder. 

535. When keen sensibilities of this kind are con- 
joined with much productive force or free power in 
the individual mind, the product of the combination is 
the poetic character, which may give expression to it- 
self either in poetry or in the fine arts. Eminent in- 
stances of this sort of feeling and of power suggest the 
supposition of a distinct faculty — the imagination — 
which we come to regard as the endowment of a few 
gifted minds. Some one whom we may be thinking 
of has "no imagination." Perhaps not; and yet he 
may possess, in an extraordinary degree, the very same 
concretive power; but then this energy combines it- 
self, in him, not with tastes and sensibilities, but with 
the less impassioned emotions of abstract thought. 

536. The popular belief is strong that Memory is 
indeed a faculty by itself; and when it is possessed 
in an extraordinary degree, it seems to declare itself 
to be such. This belief is confirmed by those many 
facts which show the intimacy of that relationship of 
the mind with the brain which determines both the 
tenacity and the readiness of the memory. 

537. We are accustomed to refer a certain class of 



RELATIVE VALUE OP CERTAIN TERMS. 211 

mental operations to the "memory," while as to an- 
other class we suppose that they belong to the imag- 
ination or to the reasoning faculty; but in these in- 
stances a little attention will suffice for showing that 
both classes alike are resolvable into the same ele- 
ments. What we need on this ground is not to call 
for a faculty or separate organ, but to exercise some- 
what more discrimination than usually attaches to our 
colloquial style. 

538. If we are to admit that, in whatever relates to 
the memory, it is difficult to ascertain or to adhere to 
the distinction between physiological facts and facts 
proper to the science of Mind, we should affirm rather 
less than what may safely be alleged, which is this — 
that on this ground the two classes of facts so melt 
the one into the other, or so interlock, that to hold 
them apart is impossible. It is here that the inscru- 
table mystery of the corporeity of Mind seems to spread 
itself out and to come near to the surface, and yet, in 
the most absolute manner, does it resist any further 
endeavors to unveil it. 

539. Whatever has once entered into the conscious- 
ness — at least, if it has allied itself with the mind in 
act — so retains its place there as that, in a reflected 
manner, it may return to the consciousness with near- 
ly all its original vivacity and distinctness. 

540. Facts are not wanting — but we must not at 
this time stop to adduce them — which sustain the be- 
lief that nothing which has ever belonged to conscious- 
ness is afterward absolutely lost from it. This may 
be as difficult of belief as it is impossible to conceive 
of it, or to follow it out in its conditions, and yet it 



212 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

may be true ; and not more inconceivable is it than 
are very many of the surest conclusions or the most 
indisputable facts of physical science. 

541. To what extent the countless accumulations 
of a fully-stocked mind may be recoverable at will, 
must depend upon the structure and the condition of 
the individual mind and brain as well as upon its 
habits. But here we must distinguish between the 
recovery at will of a former consciousness, and its spon- 
taneous return, uncalled for and uncaused, as to the 
mind itself. 

542. That mere sensations adhere to the mind so 
as to be recoverable does not certainly appear, but it 
is certain that whatever has been taken up, and has 
been assimilated by the mind, has in such a way be- 
come a permanent constituent of the intellectual ex- 
istence that it may rise to the surface, and be anew 
recognized as part of ourselves at any distance of time 
afterward. 

543. The entire material of dreams, fragmentary and 
strangely compacted as they may be, is supplied from 
this source ; and so is that day-dreaming which con- 
stitutes, to a large extent, the passive consciousness 
of less active minds throughout the earliest years of 
life, and not less so of its latest years. 

544. The recovery at will, or, as we should say, by 
the mind itself, of particular portions or of single atoms 
of these vast accumulations appears to depend (perhaps 
absolutely) upon laws of association or suggestion ; 
that is to say, we regain possession of that of which, in 
truth, we are already in possession by its relationship 
to some element of the now-consciousness. A careful 



RELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TEEMS. 213 

analysis of that which takes place in any instance in 
which we apply ourselves to the recovery of what we 
believe to be somewhere within our reach will show 
that it is by help of something actually in view that 
we regain what is out of view. 

545. The term " memory" is most often applied to 
two classes only of the vast fund of matters which have 
formed adhesions to the consciousness. The first of 
these is constituted of those recollections which stand 
in chronological order, and which make up the series 
of every one's personal history. The second of these 
classes embraces all those sets of ideas which, though 
they have actually come into the mind in the order 
of time, have so often been recalled, apart from any 
noted contemporaneous facts, that their linking one to 
another has proceeded upon some other ground than 
that of succession in time. 

546. For instance, if we have only once passed 
through a country, the features of which are strongly 
marked, as a mountain region, we recollect its preci- 
pices, its ravines, its waterfalls, its villages, in the 
chronological order of the days and hours of a week's 
or month's excursion ; but the villas, and hamlets, and 
green lanes of a district through which we have passed 
many thousand times, riding, driving, walking, by day, 
by night, fair weather and foul, alone and in company 
— these objects have quite broken themselves off from 
their chronological places in the memory, and they are 
held in view on another principle, as that of juxtapo- 
sition in space. 

547. If we except a few instances of extraordinary 
mental structure, then — and as to the common mind 



214 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

— the most steadfast, the surest, and the most readily 
recoverable class of ideas belonging to the personal 
consciousness are those which have come to adhere to 
it in the order of time ; that is to say, those which 
have accrued from day to day throughout the years of 
the individual life. Among these chronological mate- 
rials, those which are nearly identical in circumstance, 
such as the daily events of a monotonous existence — 
a life, for instance, of daily labor in the same place — 
these cease to be distinguishable, and they can be re- 
covered only in mass. As to the marked events or in- 
cidents of a life of adventure or of concernment with 
public persons, these preserve, to the end, their chron- 
ological order, and they are recoverable, generally, by 
aid of their sequence as a series in time. 

548. The fixedness of these materials and the read- 
iness with which they are recovered results from the 
combination of such conditions as these. The inci- 
dents of the individual history are single, for no one 
of them has actually occurred a second time ; they are 
conserved in a series which has been liable to no dis- 
turbance. Many of them, the leading events of life — 
and some, too, which were of small importance — were 
attended with vivid emotions, and have often returned, 
bringing with them some portion of the same feelings ; 
and, lastly, this series of incidents and events, with its 
various points of intensity, has been a worn way to the 
mind itself — a path that has been retrodden thousands 
of times. 

549. Not much inferior to these in fixedness or in 
recoverable readiness is that vast mass of materials 
which make up the subject-matter of a man's business 



EELATIVE VALUE OF CERTAIN TEEMS. 215 

or profession, or of his chosen pursuits. A principal 
in a house of wholesale trade retains in distinct and 
immediate recollection the many species of goods in 
which he deals, and the thousand varieties in each 
species, and the variations of fashion affecting each, 
and the ups and downs of prices. Materials of this 
kind never fail to fall under some system of convenient 
classification — factitious, perhaps, or rational — but 
such as serves to bring the whole into contact with 
the mind at every moment by the aid of a settled or- 
der, long-established, and seldom subjected to change. 

550. The almost incalculable materials that are em- 
braced in a familiar knowledge of four or five languages 
— the two classical, with three or four of the modern 
languages — are so held in possession as to be avail- 
able in several distinguishable modes, the specifying 
of which belongs in part to a systematic education, in 
part to a comprehensive logic, and in part to philology 
and rhetoric. 

551. The usage of the phrase the faculty of Mem- 
ory has been determined more by accident than by 
any regard to the nature of things. We speak of an 
excellent memory, or of a wonderful or prodigious 
memory, or of a defective memory ; but these excel- 
lences or these defects attach to the mind not merely 
in relation to its retentiveness of its stores or to the 
facility of recovering portions of them, but rather to 
its general vigor and tone, or to the vividness of its 
emotions or tastes, or to the organic condition of the 
brain. The memory brings out to view the general 
condition of the mind — its force or its weakness. 

552. In like manner as it belongs to scientific edu- 



216 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

cation, or to logic, or to rhetoric, or to philology, to 
reduce to a systematic form whatever relates to the 
exercise or culture of the memory, so, whatever con- 
cerns the Reasoning Faculty, and its culture, and its 
application, should be included in a course of logical 
discipline. These subjects, on account of their ex- 
tensive relation, as well to the business of life as to 
scientific and intellectual occupations, could not, to 
any good purpose, be treated of within the compass of 
a section in an elementary book that is to embrace 
various subjects. 

553. Reason in man is Mind in act toward the 
sameness and the difference which constitute any series 
of complex abstract notions. Reasoning is the follow- 
ing of sameness and difference from one pair of com- 
plex abstractions to the next, on this condition- — that 
the pairs shall constitute a continuous series, without 
fault or break, from the first pair to the last. 

554. From an incidental source — the necessities of 
method — a misapprehension of this sort arises, that 
those mental operations which, for the sake of method, 
we are compelled to treat separately, each in a section 
or chapter to itself, are ordinarily carried forward in- 
dependently of other operations, and of other functions 
of the intellectual life ; whereas, in fact, it is only in 
rare instances, or on the less usual occasions, that the 
mind passes through any process whatever, or carries 
forward any operation, even of the most purely abstract 
kind, in any such simple condition, or otherwise than 
in the plenitude of its powers and habits of feeling. 

555. It may be granted that, midway in a mathe- 
matical calculation, or while in the very heart of a sci- 



THE EMOTIONS: DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 217 

entitle inquiry, the intellectual power is moving for- 
ward on a line with the direct course of which nothing- 
interferes, arising from tastes or emotions, or from a 
forethought of the result. Such instances duly al- 
lowed for, then it is true that, as to the great body of 
our mental acts, the whole mind — the reason and soul 
— the accumulations, sensuous and intellectual, of the 
conceptive faculty — the feelings, individual and social, 
and the moral sentiments also — all these elements Avork 
together, and are intricately blended in the product of 
thought, be it what it may. 

556. But it is not until after the various elements 
of our intellectual existence have been separately men- 
tioned and severally treated of that we can be in a po- 
sition to review our subject as a whole, and to know, 
with distinctness and certainty, what it is we mean 
when we affirm of the human mind that it is One — 
one power, with its emotions and its boundless capacity 
of retaining and recalling whatever at any time it has 
attached to itself by its own act. 



XVI. 

THE EMOTIONS : DISTRIBUTION OP THE SUBJECT. 

557. The inconveniences already referred to that 
attach to the treatment of subjects such as those now 
before us in chapters and sections, will not be of much 
ill consequence if we keep this in view, that what we 
thus bring forward in a certain artificial order, naming 
certain elements, whether they be three, or five, or 
twenty, do, in fact, scarcely ever come before us in 

K 



218 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

their rudimental simplicity, or as they must appear in 
a book. Nature seldom offers to our observation these 
functions of life otherwise than in a state of intimately 
commingled action. 

558. In relation to the wide range of subjects which 
now come to be considered, it is especially true — or it 
is true in human nature, if not in other natures — that 
the machinery of life is impelled far less often by those 
simple impulses which in theory might seem to be the 
most imperative, than by motives that have become 
highly complicated or artificial, and to reduce which to 
their constituent elements may be extremely difficult. 

559. It is a rule which, if it be not universal, is yet 
of very general application, that the more any motive 
is remote from its source in some instinct, the more 
determinative is the force it exerts in ruling the con- 
duct. Material forces diminish as they recede from 
the centre whence they spring, but, to a great extent, 
a contrary rule is applicable to moral forces. 

560. The instinctive dread of extreme bodily pain, 
and the consequent endeavor to avoid it when it is im- 
minent, are rudimental impulses, and they are very in- 
tense, taking effect upon all orders of conscious and 
voluntary beings — upon all that live, and that possess 
a nervous system, with its locomotive powers. But 
the instances are not by any means rare in which the 
most extreme bodily anguish has been knowingly and 
freely encountered, and has been resolutely borne at 
the instigation of motives which are so nice in their 
structure and so ambiguous in their elements that to 
designate them with absolute certainty is more than 
can be done. Of Ignatius Loyola and of Sir Charles 



THE EMOTIONS: DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 219 

Napier, it is reported that they endured the most ex- 
treme agonies for the sake of a handsome leg. Every 
surgeon could furnish instances of the same import. 

561. It must be a rude philosophy which assumes 
the rule that those motives or instincts which stand 
foremost in a scheme of moral science, and which ap- 
pear to he entitled to a preference on all occasions, do, 
in fact, always govern human nature, or give law to 
the conduct and behavior of men. 

562. On this ground, again, while we find it need- 
ful to take our start on a level with the animal orders 
around us, we speedily ascend thence, and take posi- 
tion on a level to which none of those orders ever make 
an approach. The impulses and emotions that have 
place in human nature, and the existence of which we 
recognize also in almost the lowest ranks of animal 
life, take effect with them in their rudimental state, and 
they operate with a force the intensity of which is di- 
rectly as its simplicity. 

563. Animal appetites and instincts present them- 
selves in the inferior orders much as they do in a me- 
thodical treatise, or as they stand in the " table of con- 
tents" of a book. But human motives, such as we find 
them taking effect in the economy of the social system, 
are not merely complications evolved within the indi- 
vidual man, but they are complications evolved out of 
other complications within the social system, under the 
form of conventional habits of feeling and of acting. 

564. There are more schemes than one, and each 
has its recommendation, according to which the emo- 
tional elements of the world of mind may be distribu- 
tively considered, or spread out to view in a tabulated 



220 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

manner. One such scheme may claim a preference 
over others on the ground of its comprehensiveness ; 
but let this only be remembered, 

565. That the propriety of the scheme we may adopt 
is to be determined by the issue of a previous question 
as to the point of view from which we intend to bring 
human nature into our perspective. For instance, we 
may choose to think of Man as the most perfectly de- 
veloped of the vertebrate animals, possessed of more 
brain than any of his fellows, and having an organiza- 
tion and limbs corresponding to so large a cerebral 
mass, or we may choose to think of Man as he is seen 
from his own level of developed reason and feeling; 
and thus, while we recognize certain analogies which 
connect him with the lower ranks of animal life, we 
may quickly dismiss these crude physiological facts, 
and spread human nature out to view in its preroga- 
tives as a high intelligence, although it be subjected to 
the conditions of animal organization. 

566. Yet again we may ascend to a still loftier plat- 
form. Finding, as we must, that some even of the 
most constant elements of human nature receive no ex- 
plication, and take no fit place in any scheme which 
plants itself upon the terrestrial level, although it be 
the very highest level with which we can there either 
discover or construct, we may boldly resolve to inter- 
pret man by the aid of a theologic hypothesis. We 
may determine to read human nature spiritually, and 
then may so draw out our scheme of its emotional el- 
ements as to be inclusive of the principles of the moral 
and relia;ious life. 

567. It must not be imagined that when, according 



THE EMOTIONS: DISTRIBUTION OF THE SUBJECT. 221 

to this last-mentioned method, we have made provi- 
sion for embracing all the facts or phenomena of hu- 
man nature (some of which must otherwise Tbe thrown 
aside as if they were of no significance), we shall stand 
clear of mysteries and of various perplexities. It will 
not be so ; but the issue we shall arrive at will be 
nearly the same as that to which the physical sciences 
lead us : we shall not come to unveil mysteries, but 
we shall, at least, have modestly noted, and taken due 
account of, all the facts that belong to our subject. 

568. In this elementary book we take our position 
at once on this last named and higher ground, not be- 
cause the author is swayed in doing so by a religious 
intention, but because this is the only ground on which 
all the phenomena of human nature, or, let us say, the 
circle of facts belonging to our subject — the world of 
Mind — can receive an explanation that is in any sense 
intelligible. 

569. It is better at once to remit to the hands of 
the physiologist those subjects bordering upon mental 
philosophy, in relation to which we find it impossible 
to observe that distinction between the two depart- 
ments, a disregard of which never fails to vitiate both 
sciences (239). 

570. A philosophy of the world of Mind need not 
concern itself with those appetites which find their be- 
ginning and their end — their reason complete — in the 
functions of the animal organization. It is true that 
Mind mingles itself with these impulses, but it does so 
in a manner which the physiologist is competent to 
treat of, and we may well leave him in undisturbed 
possession of his proper subjects on this ground. 



222 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

571. There are, however, impulses of an instinctive 
kind, which, while they relate immediately to the well- 
being of the animal, have a broader bearing, and blend 
themselves more easily with emotions of a higher order. 

572. These feelings present themselves in pairs ; 
that is to say, there is a certain feeling, and it has its 
antagonist feeling, or its contrary, or its complement, 
and in various instances that which we must regard as 
the secondary or subordinate emotion becomes, in fact, 
the stronger, or the more intense of the two. A taste 
may be pleasurable, and yet feeble ; but its opposite 
distaste may be nothing less than a vehement disgust, 
or even horror. 

572. Again, a distaste, very potent in itself, or ve- 
hement, may give way to a taste of a higher and of a 
very placid kind. As, for instance, the distaste felt 
by most persons, and by some peculiarly, toward ob- 
jects such as those which offend the senses in the 
rooms of the animal physiologist, yields to the philo- 
sophic taste, which itself never rises to a higher tem- 
perature than that of a gentle intellectual curiosity. 
This effect takes place long before the time when fa- 
miliarity with such objects has lessened their impul- 
siveness. 

574. Simplicity in its rudiments, and the highest 
degree of complication in its developments — these are 
the two characteristics of Mind. So long as we keep 
this in view, we may have recourse, for convenience, 
to a methodical treatment of intellectual subjects, with- 
out much risk of being led to think that any such 
method is a mirror reflecting truly the phenomena of 
nature. 



THE EMOTIONS : DISTRIBUTION OP THE SUBJECT. 223 

575. A distribution of subjects in this department, 
which is perhaps as convenient as any other, and which 
keeps as near to the truth of nature as any other, is 
of this sort : those feelings, desires, impulses, emo- 
tions, which, as these last two Avords imply, become 
the immediate cause or the incentive of some course 
of action or of some single act, may be considered, 
first, as they stand related to the well-being of the in- 
dividual (mind and body as one), or, secondly, as they 
are related to beings around us, like ourselves, and 
whose well-being affects us, directly or indirectly, as 
our own. This second includes, of course, whatever 
belongs to the social affections, whether they be be- 
nign or the contrary. 

576. Impulses, desires, affections, emotions, senti- 
ments, call them what we may, which fall under either 
the first or the second of these heads, or which belong 
in part to the one and in part to the other, may be re- 
garded, in a merely p hysical sense, as good, just as we 
approve of the several parts of a machine when we see 
that every part, and every function in its movements, 
is truly related to the intention of the whole — every 
thing is what it should be, and is where it should be. 
Thus, for instance, those intellectual emotions of which 
already we have spoken are good in themselves, and 
they have their office in developing the powers of the 
human mind, and in giving to human nature, individ- 
ually and socially, its utmost enlargement, and its 
highest culture and refinement. 

577. But these same elements — these emotions, 
whether they be of the first class or of the second — 
stand related to feelings of quite another kind, and in 



224 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

consequence of that relationship we involuntarily re- 
gard them, when they are in a due condition, as good y 
and when in a deranged condition, as evil, in a sense 
to which we apply the comprehensive term Moral. 
The feeling is good or bad, and the action arising from 
it is to be approved or to be condemned on grounds that 
are distinct from those on which our judgments rest 
concerning mechanical constructions, or concerning 
an organization, vegetable or animal, or concerning 
human nature itself when it is physically considered. 

578. This relationship of all the functions of human 
nature toward the Moral Sense is of so distinct a kind, 
and it carries with it consequences so important, that 
it can never be duly considered or properly treated of, 
not even in an elementary manner, otherwise than by 
itself. We are liable to fall not merely into confusions 
of thought, but into serious errors, if we go on, not 
duly regardful of the fundamental difference between 
what is physically good and what is morally good. In 
this elementary book, therefore, while we keep this 
momentous distinction constantly in view, we remit 
the treatment of the subject, namely, the moral as- 
pect of human nature, to another occasion. 



XVII. 

EMOTIONS RELATED TO THE INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 

579. We should go too far if we were to affirm that 
what we can not conceive of can not be. This would 
be to follow the ill example of an antiquated philoso- 
phy. We grant, then, that what may be very difficult 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 225 

to imagine may yet possibly exist, albeit no sample of 
any such mode of existence comes under our observa- 
tion in this actual world. For example, it is not easy 
to imagine Iioav it should be that so frail a mass as an 
animal organization could be conserved, and that its 
well-being could be maintained, unless it be made lia- 
ble to pain, and unless life be held on the condition of 
possible damage and loss. 

580. If the animal is conscious of good, and if, 
therefore, it may enjoy life, and if powers of locomo- 
tion are granted to it, and if it is expected to go in 
quest of its welfare, and if it is to remove itself from 
whatever is hurtful, then must it not also be conscious 
of ill, and be capable of pain, and be liable to suffer 
from privation ? To imagine how things might be 
otherwise constituted than they are is the business of 
those who set themselves to construct theories, but in 
this place we have to do only with things with which 
we find ourselves surrounded. 

581. All species known to us, either in the present 
animal system, or in those of remote eras that have 
passed away, exist, and have existed, by means of the 
antagonism of enjoyment and of suffering. Then these 
counteractive forces are required to be kept in adjust- 
ment perpetually by the instincts — the intelligence — 
the providence, and the active efforts of the individual 
animal. 

582. Life — and human life here has no exemptive 
prerogative — life is a good that is to be won and main- 
tained by driving back the inroads of pain. Life is to 
be fought for, hand to hand, with the destroyers of life. 

583. Counteractive emotions, taking their spring 

K2 



226 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

from alternating experiences of pleasure and of pain, 
or of organic good and evil, are the forces apart from 
which the rudiments of Mind, so far as we can see, 
would never be developed. These opposing powers, 
taking effect sometimes irrespectively of any process 
of thought — and we then call them instincts — some- 
times in alliance with thought — and we call them then 
emotions — have relation primarily to the conservation 
of the animal as a sentient organization. And this 
organization is a framework of so frail a sort that it 
may he broken, rent, crushed at any moment. 

584. Organic good and evil — pleasure and pain — 
tastes and distastes, are either present at the moment, 
and thus take effect upon the mind in a direct man- 
ner, or they are remembered : they come to be present 
in Idea, and they are thought of also as contingently 
future ; and it is to this ideal form of any feeling, 
chiefly, if not solely, that we apply the word Emotion. 
An Emotion is the thought of pleasure or of pain, 
either near at hand or remote, in the past or in the 
future. 

585. The one term Emotion is often employed (be- 
cause we have no better word) comprehensively of all 
kinds and degrees of feeling, whether they be appe- 
tites, desires, hopes, fears, aversions, disgusts, which 
bear upon the individual welfare : it is applied also to 
feelings of a very different class, namely, the social 
affections ; and it would be well if we had in use 
several words instead of one, where the difference in 
meaning is so great. 

586. And in respect also of those emotions of the 
first-named kind, there is room for more discrimination 



EMOTIONS EELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 227 

than is indicated in the ordinary phrases at our com- 
mand. The infusorial animalcule, just now awaked 
from its germ-state, and when it has had no experience 
Whatever of the pain, harm, or violence that abound 
in the world, is seen to snatch itself up at the least 
agitation of the water in which it floats, and to gather 
in its tendrils, or to crouch in its cell. But this pre- 
cautionary action must he considered as only a function 
of the nervous system ; it is not an alarm of the mind. 
The same conservative instincts attach to all orders of 
animals, man included ; hut it is not of such instincts 
that we have now to speak : they connect themselves 
indeed with mind, hut they belong more directly to 
physiology than to mental philosophy. 

587. It is when these elements have undergone a 
reflective process, and have passed through combina- 
tions, that they claim to be considered as proper to the 
world of Mind. Animal good and evil, actually ex- 
perienced, is thenceforth remembered, and revolved, and 
repeated in Idea, and thus gives rise to action. It is 
to this complicate and reflective feeling that the word 
Emotion is applied in its most proper sense. 

588. If emotion be thus denned, it can not be known 
how far the inferior orders come within the circle of 
this soul-life : they may touch the borders of it, but 
not more, for to enter farther would imply some de- 
velopment of the moral element ; and this must be- 
wray itself in other modes. The being, whatever is 
its structure and its organization, that, by emotions 
centred upon itself, becomes a person, will be seen to 
be choosing a path for himself: he will be walking 
individually in his own way, and to some extent he 



228 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

will be a nonconformist in relation to his species or 
tribe. 

589. It is much rather on the side of their sensi- 
bilities toward man than as related to their own species 
that domesticated animals give evidence of their partic- 
ipating in the emotional life, or of possessing feelings 
of a higher order than the merely animal instincts. So 
far as the dog shows that he has a soul, it is in his 
behavior toward his master, not as toward his kind: 
toward his kind it is his instincts only that take effect ; 
but his fond attachment to his master has a depth, and 
a permanence too, that bring him near upon the borders 
of those affections which we reckon to be proper to 
human nature. The attachment of the faithful dog 
to his master is, moreover, pure of the taint of selfish- 
ness, and it is so through the limitation or imperfec- 
tion of his nature. The animal mind does not rumi- 
nate — it does not turn in upon itself: the animal soul 
wants, as we must believe, the individualizing tend- 
ency: it forms no estimate of its personal condition 
as better or worse than that of others. The dog (so 
we must suppose) does not think of himself as the 
happiest of his species or as the most miserable; though 
he be entirely self-seeking as to his instincts, he is 
quite free from selfishness as to his mind. 

590. But human nature, even in its most degraded 
condition, gives evidence of this reflective tendency, 
and every advance in culture and refinement greatly 
enhances it. Consciousness, with its many elements 
of feeling, its ever-varying experiences, its recollections, 
and its anticipations, is, in the cultured man, always 
revolving upon itself; it is returning upon the trodden 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 229 

path of its individual history, comparing itself with 
itself, and with all things and persons around it. It 
is in this manner that the individual becomes, as we 
may say, congested and compacted. The man sets 
himself off from his species ; he shuts out invasions ; 
he imparts himself only so far as he wills to do so ; 
he cherishes the feeling of insulation, upon which an- 
other feeling will sooner or later come to lodge itself, 
namely, that of moral responsibility. The course of 
things is direct and inevitable which has this issue in 
view ; emotions, pleasurable and the contrary, related 
to the individual well-being, bring on a reverberative 
feeling — a reflective consciousness ; and the next for- 
ward step must be taken, which is a tacit confession 
of relationship to a moral system. 

591. Then again, in another manner, out of the ele- 
ments of those feelings that relate immediately to the 
individual good there springs a further preparation for 
the working of a moral system ; it is of this sort : 

592. The ever-changing experiences of good and evil 
— of organic enjoyment and suffering — of satiety and 
privation — pass into the form of motives of action, bal- 
anced one against another, or one against several. 
An intense experience, simply organic, balances often 
against a complex experience, with which reason has 
more or less to do, and then the determinative force— 
the proper power of Mind — comes out in the resolve. 
Many are the oscillations, many the decisions and the 
counter decisions which take place when, exclusive of 
any properly moral influence, what may be called the 
physical machinery of mind is finding its state of equi- 
librium. 



230 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

593. The individual experiences, inasmuch as they 
have taken their places, at the first, in chronological 
order, so do they become fixed in that order with more 
and more distinctness while this interaction of motives 
is going on. The mind makes for itself a wont-way 
upon the field of its personal history, and thus it ac- 
quires the habit of deriving its motives from sources 
that are remote from the present hour. The impulses 
of the moment may be very intense, and they may be 
of prevailing force ; but already they have met a coun- 
teraction from influences that are of ancient date in the 
personal history : so it is that the now and the by-gone 
are being brought to an adjustment. 

594. The tyranny of momentary impulses is broken 
when once its power has come to be shared with mo- 
tives that are of various dates. This simple fact in 
human nature should be noted, for it is one of its prin- 
cipal distinctions as compared with the animal natures 
around it, that the momentary organic good or ill touch- 
ing the individual well-being is a force counterpoised 
by forces that are not of this instant, but are of times 
remembered. If we say, as we must, that the imme- 
diate force is likely to prevail over a force more remote, 
we must also admit that, in the actual working of hu- 
man nature, the result of culture and refinement is to 
give to remote motives a coherence and consistency 
which is found to be more than enough to countervail 
their antagonist. What are the usages of polished so- 
ciety but so many instances of this very kind, in which, 
apart from any motives that have a moral import, the 
behavior of the man at the present moment has come 
under the control of motives drawn from past times ? 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 231 

The personal behavior of the civilized man is the ex- 
ponent of his history — it is not the result of any self- 
seeking impulse of the moment. 

595. It can not be known how much of depth or of 
efficacy might belong to these remote motives if they 
were drawn exclusively from each one's individual ex- 
perience. In fact, they are never limited as to their 
origin in any such manner. The individual man takes 
up, unconsciously, along with his single experiences, 
all that he sees, hears, or imagines of the experiences 
of others. The ideal of well-being which has formed 
itself within him, with the motives which spring from 
this conception, embraces whatever may have been re- 
lated and whatever may have been imagined of enjoy- 
ment and of suffering that is incident to the lot of man 
— even the most extreme instances in both kinds. 

596. In truth, those emotions that take their rise in 
our sympathies, and that come within the range of the 
imagination, usually possess a force very far exceed- 
ing that of feelings arising merely from our individual 
experience. Thus it is that the vigor of the personal 
conduct — the courage — the activity of the man — his 
power of endurance — his patient determination, and 
what is called the " strength of his will," while they 
bear proportion, in part, to what have been his per- 
sonal experiences as more or less ordinary, and in part 
to his susceptibility of feeling according to his temper- 
ament, yet more are they proportionate to the breadth 
of the view that he has been used to take of the lot of 
his fellow-men, and to the power of the imaginative 
faculty, which may so have magnified things actual, 
and may so have imparted an undefined intensity to 



232 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

all elements of human life — its good and its evil — as 
to lift him, in, conduct, far above the level to which 
any motives of self-advantage could have raised him. 

597. It is when those emotions which take their 
rise in the impulses of the individual welfare combine 
themselves, as they are prompt to do, with the social 
emotions, and gather to themselves immeasurable force 
from these sympathies — it is then that human nature 
puts forth its powers in their amplitude, and that man 
gives evidence of what great things he may do and en- 
dure when every faculty which belongs to his structure 
has come to take its part in determining his conduct. 

598. The difference in power between a merely self- 
intending impulse, and such an impulse when it is com- 
bined with motives or dispositions of the social class, 
is seen in instances such as these : A mere intention, 
having for its object the animal well-being of the in- 
dividual man, may be strong in a given degree ; but 
when a feeling of the same kind commingles itself with 
the thought of others who are imagined, or are known 
to be competing with him for the goods of life, it be- 
comes intense : it is then a selfishness, which, unless 
it be effectively controlled, overrides all other disposi- 
tions, and tramples upon all sympathies. 

599. There are contrary instances that have the 
same significance, and that convey their meaning in a 
happier manner. A self-intending impulse prompts 
us to avoid, and, if it be possible, to retreat from, acute 
pain ; but the instances are of every-day occurrence in 
domestic life of a free and continuous endurance of 
acute pain, or of the most exhaustive labors, at the in- 
stigation of the gentle affections. The ascetic bears 



EMOTIONS EELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 233 

his burden of self-imposed animal misery at the bid- 
ding; of motives that are drawn from remote sources, 
and which have become highly complicated ; for it is 
far from true that a stern religious dread is the princi- 
pal ingredient in this voluntary martyr's course. 

600. It is for the physiologist to treat, severally and 
in his own way, of those appetites and instincts which 
belong to the animal organization. In relation to the 
world of Mind, we have to think of them only as 
forming a class, and we have to note the place which 
these feelings and impulses occupy in the structure 
of human nature as endowed with mind. Then, to 
determine this place, we must look around to other 
natures, participants also in the same conservative 
emotions, but participating therein under very differ- 
ent conditions. 

601. In human nature, as we have said, the now- 
present organic impulse meets, at a very early stage of 
the individual history, a counterpoise resulting from 
recollected experiences of enjoyment and of suffering. 
Each instance of such a counteraction between pres- 
ent sensations and recollected feelings brings the man 
into a state of complex action, and gives rise to that 
rumination— that usage of passing to and fro, up and 
down, upon the pathway of the individual history, of 
Avhich already we have spoken. The mind, thus fall- 
ing into the chronological habit, acquires more and 
more consciousness toward its own continuous welfare. 
In this way, minds of the thoughtful class live every 
hour at a much higher rate than the things of the 
hour would imply. If we might formulate the enjoy- 
ment and the suffering — the pleasure and the pain of 



234 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

each passing period of human existence, it must be 
in some such way as this : An hour of life in human 
nature is the present good and ill, plus the good and 
ill of all past hours dimly or vividly reflected upon it. 

602. It may be asked, How do we know that the 
inferior minds around us are not reflective in this same 
way, or that they do not ruminate upon the condition 
of their individual lot ? In one sense we do not and 
can not know this, for we can not enter the conscious- 
ness of another being. For aught we can know, the 
animals that crouch on the hearth at our feet may be 
meditating the deepest things of philosophy. Who 
can say it is not so ? 

603. Yet we are not left quite in the dark on this 
ground. Mind indicates, in one mode or in another, 
the working of its faculties. The supposition that 
there are minds which in no interpretable way express 
in their behavior what is going on within, we should 
not easily admit. Now the fact of the reflective tend- 
ency in human nature indicates itself in many intelli- 
gible modes, as thus : that consciousness of individu- 
ality which is the product of meditation upon the ex- 
periences of past times shows the source whence it 
has been derived in whatever is peculiar in the con- 
duct and behavior of the man. Man differs from man 
very much more than do the individuals of any of the 
lower species differ one from another ; and just in pro- 
portion as the reflective habit has become more preva- 
lent, so is individual character the more marked. 

604. If now we look at the two structures, and 
compare them — human nature on the one side, and the 
brute nature on the other side — we must see that, in 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 235 

the one, provision is made for the exercise of powers 
which, in the other case, have scarcely any room to 
develop themselves. Human nature includes and im- 
plies a power of determinate action in those cases 
when impulses related to the individual well-being are 
held in balance with what is remembered of the past, 
or, in other words, when the now-instant good or ill is 
not taken or avoided — is not embraced or rejected — 
until after some gone-by experiences have appeared in 
court and have been listened to. 

605. It is of no consequence to our immediate pur- 
pose whether we apply one theory or another theory 
to the explication of the mental process in such in- 
stances. The fact is this : that human nature includes 
a power of counteraction of which we find few and fee- 
ble, or no traces at all, in any other nature. We may 
say, if we please, that this controlling force, which we 
claim as the distinction of human nature, is a force 
that is itself controlled by an anterior force, and which 
again, in its turn, is controlled by another higher up, 
and so on ; or, instead of these interminable repeti- 
tions, which add nothing to our knowledge of the 
mysteries of Mind, we may be content to say at once 
that human nature is endowed with a sovereign power 
of Avhich brute nature possesses only a rudiment. 

606. We may see this difference in progress and 
coming to view in certain instances. That conserva- 
tive function of the nervous system which impels the 
animal to withdraw itself from harm with electric ve- 
locity, belongs, in a degree, to all orders of animals, 
and it is especially displayed in some of the lowest or- 
ders of life. Animal life might, with little ambiguity, 



236 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

be defined in this very way ; and we might say that 
an animal is an organization which shrinks at the ap- 
proach of harm. 

607. So much of this instinctive withdrawment 
from danger, imminent, as may belong to the nervous 
system, we should here take little account of; but 
there ensues very quickly, when the animal is in pres- 
ence of danger, the next following conservative move- 
ment, which, no doubt, belongs to the mind : this is 
either its using its locomotive means of escape, or the 
making a defense — a repelling of the threatened harm — 
by some counteraction. These defensive acts, in part 
instinctive as they are, often involve some calculation 
of chances, and then the use of some cautionary expe- 
dients, either instinctive or acquired trom experience. 
Instead of any attempt either at escape or defense, 
some animals use an artifice ; so does the eft, which 
shams itself a bit of stick, and risks the being trod 
upon as such rather than take the chances of a run 
across the cellar ; yet, if the next heap of rubbish in 
which it may hide itself be quite near at hand, it will, 
in preference, trust to its legs. This is mind ; this is 
a ruling among counterbalanced inducements. The 
fox, and, still more so, the rat, displays some refine- 
ment of intelligence in makins: his choice either of a 
direct retreat, or of a trick, or ot a courageous defense 
of himself on the spot. 

608. In every instance in which an animal resolves 
upon an active defense of his life, he imputes an inten- 
tion to harm him to the object of his dread. He rec- 
ognizes a mind hostile to himself; and this recogni- 
tion, unless it be such as to produce abject terror, 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 237 

awakens anger — an emotion intended to sustain the 
animal forces, and to exclude dismay, when an enemy 
seems to be meditating harm. 

609. But a difference presents itself at this stage 
between the brute mind and the human. The animal, 
when he is accidentally hurt, as by a fall, or by the 
fall of a stone upon him, does not make the mistake 
of imputing a hostile purpose to that which has me- 
chanically hurt him : he bears the pain in dumb pa- 
tience ; but the young of the human species, in the 
exuberance of his own emotional nature, and as he is 
himself full of purpose and intention in every act, im- 
putes an ill feeling, however absurdly, to the table 
against the edge of which he has struck his head, or 
to the stone upon which he has stumbled and fallen. 
This error may, perhaps, have been encouraged by the 
foolish woman, his nurse, but the source of it is in 
himself; and it is only by degrees that he frees him- 
self from the absurdity, as he finds that his petulance 
exposes him to be laughed at. 

610. A few steps farther, but not far, we find the 
brute mind and the human running parallel on this 
line, namely, of those emotions that are conservative 
of life. Anger, in all its degrees of intensity or ve- 
hemence, gives way to counteraction in several modes: 
even the hyama behind his iron bars throws upon his 
keeper a look which indicates a mingling of awe with 
his savage rage. 

611. The earliest abatements of instinctive anger 
are those which it receives from the united suggestions 
of fear and experience. A prudential calculation of 
the consequences overrules the heat of the moment, 



238 THE WOELD OP MIND. 

and represses it ; and when we say that it is repress- 
ed, we mean that it is governed by the mind in virtue 
of its inherent force. 

612. The next step in the course of counteraction 
is that which ensues when there takes place a compli- 
cation of anger upon itself in its congested state, as a 
harbored malice or a purpose of revenge. Many in- 
stances are related among " animal anecdotes" which 
have this meaning : the brute mind appears to be sus- 
ceptible, in some degree, of chronic anger or malignan- 
cy, and therefore animals have been seen to choke the 
outbursts of passion, that so, by this means, they might 
the better achieve a delayed and more ample revenge. 
Human nature, alas ! is capable of holding its pur- 
poses of revenge entire through long eras, and of sham- 
ming love from year to year, while it is watching the 
opportunity to use the knife of the murderer. 

613. The conservative instinct of self-defense, when 
it has thoroughly kindled the emotion of anger, exhib- 
its its most extreme vehemence when it has taken up 
another element, namely, a social instinct. Hence the 
reason of the proverbial instance : we are told that, 
among things the most to be dreaded, is, not a tiger in 
quest of his prey, but a "bear bereaved of her whelps." 
The further from its source, the greater the intensity 
of feeling ; the more it is complicated, so much the 
more of force belongs to all emotional forces. This 
appears to be a law in the world of Mind ; and an il- 
lustration of it the most apt is this of the courage, and 
strength, and fierceness of the dam when she fights in 
defense of her young. 

614. Yet at this juncture, and just where conserv- 



EMOTIONS EELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 239 

ative anger combines itself with a social emotion, we 
catch another indication of the difference between the 
brute mind and human nature : this indication deserves 
to be regarded. Whether the human infant is ever 
defended with a determination more fixed than that 
which screens the young of animals from harm, may 
be a question ; but there is no question when, putting 
out of view the maternal instinct, we take an example 
of another kind, in which life-protective anger com- 
bines itself with an emotion that is not of the merely 
instinctive class. 

615. Even supposing that some few instances of an 
ambiguous kind might be adduced in contradiction of 
what we now affirm, yet broadly it may be affirmed 
that the brute emotions of courage and fierceness are 
never kindled at the sight of the sufferings of other 
animals, even of the same species — certainly not of 
those of any other species. But human nature in no 
case whatever so displays the boundless, and ungov- 
ernable, and tempestuous vehemence of its emotions, 
as it does when the compassionate strong man rushes 
forward for the rescue of the weak, seen to be suffer- 
ing under the hand of the cruel. This vehemence is 
barely to be curbed ; for it must be death — a tearing 
limb from limb — vengeance — ample retribution to be 
heaped upon the inflicter of the wrong : nothing less 
will satiate this burning appetite or allay its anguish. 
There are forms of this complex emotion which stand 
forward as the extreme samples of the moral forces of 
human nature. 

616. These extreme samples, no resemblances of 
which are discoverable at any level beneath the human, 



240 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

exhibit all degrees of intensity and of complexity; 
there is the momentary indignation which is excited 
in the compassionate by the savage driver of the lamed 
ox or horse in the streets, up to that swelling emotion 
of burning wrath of which that savage is the object 
who is seen to be spending his demon passions upon 
his victim, the slave. 

617. The complexity and the consequent intensity 
in these instances springs from the accession of one 
other element, in which the brute nature is no partici- 
pant, but which, in human nature, has a force far sur- 
passing every other. This new ingredient is an emo- 
tion of the moral life. . 

618. The instinctive impulse to resist or impel bod- 
ily harm is, as we have said, instantly followed by the 
emotion of anger when an intention to inflict this harm 
is imputed to him who inflicts, or who threatens to in- 
flict it. But the mere emotion of anger seldom, if in- 
deed ever, stops short in itself, or fails to ally itself 
with the all-powerful emotions of the moral sense. 
The imputation of an intention to inflict bodily harm 
upon me, or upon others for whom I care, rouses an- 
ger, wrath, rage ; but not these emotions merely ; for, 
whether I will or not, I go on to impute to my assailant 
wrongfulness as well as violence, and this imputation 
quickens the passions which it finds, imparting to them 
a tenfold vehemence. 

619. Just as the infant foolishly imputes Mind to 
the stick that has hurt him, so I may, at the moment, 
and with as little reason, impute a bad moral intention 
to my horse, who refuses to pass the object at which 
he shies ; but an error of this kind does not maintain 



EMOTIONS EELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 241 

its place beyond the first moments of vexation. In 
proportion as I feel myself warranted in imputing 
moral motives to the perpetrator of a violence — that 
is to say, when I regard him as unjust, cruel, wicked 
— every feeling which the occasion has called up is 
vastly increased in depth and vehemence ; and when 
rendered intense in this manner, these feelings may 
impel the man even to an act of self-immolation. In 
such a case — and such instances occur on the page of 
history — the circle of the emotions has fully come 
round to the point of its origin as a contradiction. 
The instinct of self-preservation was the starting- 
point, and self-immolation is the end to which it leads. 

620. Far is it from being true, in fact, that the ele- 
mentary principles of human nature offer themselves 
to view ordinarily, or often, in their simple condition. 
The question might be put, Do we ever meet with 
them in any such state ? Human nature, as compared 
with brute nature, has this constant characteristic: 
that it runs on, with instantaneous speed, from its ru- 
diments into complexities of some kind, and it shows 
its energies — its boundlessness of passion — its powers 
of endurance and of daring — it displays itself as a force 
of unmeasured compass when it has nearly reached, 
we may say, the confines of its limits of action — when 
motives too attenuated to be severally and distinctly 
recognized have become commingled so as to consti- 
tute a habit of feeling, and to be the distinguishing 
characteristic of the individual man. 

621, Take the instance of the accomplished soldier 
and gentleman, many a sample of which may be found 
on the steps of the British throne without lighting a 

L 



242 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

candle. He has a full personal knowledge of what his 
profession may some day cost him — bodily damage, 
and mutilation, and the anguish of long years — death 
being the least of the ills in his catalogue ; yet he 
cheerfully encounters all ; and in what mood of mind 
does he do so ? It is a mood highly complicated, and 
which has gone off to a remove immeasurably far from 
its rudiment. The soldier we may think ofas the 
representative of that first rudiment of animal life, the 
instinct of self-defense. And yet, even with men of 
the plebeian order, the fighting element has passed 
into a complex sentiment ; but as to the man of rank 
and of lofty professional feeling, the fighting impulse 
exists only as a germ that has done its office in the, 
character, and is lost. The calm valor of the gentle- 
man-soldier — the man high born, whose ancestors bled 
for the white rose or the red — impels him to dare more 
and to suffer more than his inferiors in the ranks can 
imitate. He is more brave, and more patient of hun- 
ger and thirst, and of bodily anguish, than is the stout 
son of one of his tenants, but as to his motives, one 
might compare them, for complexity, and for fineness 
and elaboration, to some richly-inlaid piece of furniture 
at home, that is as ancient as the earldom ; and yet, 
with the gentleman-warrior, while the truculent ele- 
ment is at its minimum of force in his nature, a com- 
passionate generosity is at its maximum ; for while 
the man is as daring as the buccaneer, arid as patient 
of suffering as any Red Indian, and is the one to go 
in front of every desperate affray, he is as warm and 
as gentle in domestic life as his mother and his sisters. 
622. We may thus trace one of those instincts 



EMOTIONS RELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 243 

which relate to the individual well-being up from its 
source, where it appears only as an animal impulse, 
and may follow it through its stages as it complicates 
itself first with social emotions and then with moral 
sentiments; and when that, in respect of which man 
appears on a level with the natures around him, has 
conjoined itself with elements with which they do not 
at all participate, the ultimate product exhibits often 
those lofty qualities which impart grandeur and depth 
to human life — private and public, domestic and his- 
toric, 

623. All this may be : the moral element may 
largely have come in to mingle itself with the social 
sentiments and affections, and to lift the man above 
the level of the animal, and yet that which, in a proper 
sense, is morally good in actions or in dispositions 
may not have been included. Virtue, or the contrary 
— goodness, or its contrary — may still be undeterm- 
ined in the character. This higher determination 
must have place on other ground than that which we 
occupy while we are considering human nature physic- 
ally only. 

624. All that is needful at this point is this : that 
we should just be aware of an important distinction, 
and should see the grounds of it. At some future 
time, the entire subject, momentous as it is, may en- 
gage our attention. 

625. What we have here called an elementary im- 
pulse, the intention of which is plainly to promote and 
secure the individual animal well-being, quickly be- 
comes complicated, as we see, first, with prudential 
considerations, which modify or restrain it ; secondly, 



244 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

with social sentiments, whether these be benign or the 
contrary ; and then with those deep and intense emo- 
tions that spring from the moral sense. But these 
emotions also may reach the highest pitch, and yet 
may fail to include what is virtuous or praiseworthy. 

626. The brigand of the Apennines is, in a word, 
the wild beast of a sensual, self-seeking existence. He 
risks all things that, at snatches, he may live like any 
cardinal, in the fullness of voluptuous satisfactions. 
But if his daily course of conduct, if its doings and its 
endurances were to be analyzed, the larger part of the 
whole of this outspend of energy, bodily and mental, 
would be claimable on behalf of his social sentiments. 
His pride and ambition as captain of the troop — his 
jealousies, his heart-burnings, his vanity, his morose- 
ness, his generosity too — all these feelings have no 
meaning apart from the social sensibility — even those 
rudimental emotions which bind man to his fellows, 
and bind him, whether by antipathies or by sympathies. 

627. Yet this lawless being, sensual as he is, and 
ferocious perhaps, nevertheless in a genuine sense is 
generous, and he is punctilious too in matters of honor; 
he is also, in a deep sense, the creature of moral feel- 
ing; and, moreover, he is devoutly religious — more 
truly, and far more seriously, is he a religious man 
than many a dignitary of his Church. His moral emo- 
tions are potent and unsophisticated, although they are 
grievously misdirected ; and his fervent piety is not 
enfeebled by knowledge and disbelief. The brigand, 
in his gloomy hour, is fighting with his remorses, just 
as, in the dark, he might be striving to strangle snakes 
that had coiled under his pillow. Then he labors hard 



EMOTIONS EELATED TO INDIVIDUAL WELL-BEING. 245 

to right the uneven balance at the foot of his Con- 
science-account by acts of mercy, by rescues effected 
for the widow and fatherless ; and, above all, he would 
do much — he would do any thing short of forsaking 
his profession — if he might only restore himself to 
favor with his patroness saint, who often, at dusk-light, 
gives him, he thinks, a reproving shake of the head 
and a frown. The brigand of the Apennines, who has 
merited the gallows a hundred times, and who lives 
for voluptuousness, is eminently the creature of social 
sentiments ; he is intensely the moral being ; and he 
is a man of worship — of worship without hypocrisy. 

628. If we were to take as our guide, in going over 
the field of human history, certain systems of human 
nature, we must resolve to reduce all its infinitely di- 
versified phenomena to the poor insignificance of a ma- 
chine, upon which lines of suggestions, like parallels 
of ribbon in a silk- Aveaver's loom, are moving forward ; 
and if self gives law to the volitions, then the will is 
determined always by the most glaring of the colors 
and patterns which catch the eye as they pass. This 
sort of philosophy fits well enough such an instance as 
that of the usurer bolted in with his bags, who is cal- 
culating the product at the year's end, and inquires, 
" Shall I lend my money at a low rate with a high se- 
curity, or at a high rate and great risk ?" After work- 
ing this problem, he gives his answer accordingly to 
the importunate applicant who is knocking at the 
shutter. 

629. Take the instance of the most thorough selfist 
we can find ; but only let him be the creature of pas- 
sion, and then his tumultuous and tempestuous course 



246 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

will be explicable on no scheme whatever which frig- 
idly resolves human nature into principles that may 
suffice for the explication of brute nature. Brute na- 
ture has its emotions, but they do not run into com- 
plications. In human nature the germ emotions col- 
lapse one upon another with organic vehemence, and 
out of these combinations spring boundless energies of 
action and of endurance. But, before we can compre- 
hend any such course of action, we must allow our- 
selves to believe that, in human nature, love is more 
than a euphony for selfism — hatred, jealousy, remorse, 
more than the reflex motives of a defeated self-interest 
appetite. These words, and the cluster of associate 
terms, are significant of realities which take their 
sweep in depths that are not sounded by a closet-made 
philosophy. 

630. It is enough if here we indicate the fact, al- 
ready mentioned more than once, that as to human 
nature, whatever ot greatness, whatever of energy for 
good or evil, whatever of individual coherence and 
unity of intention it exhibits, are the products, not of 
single elements, but of complications of elements, and 
that, as a rule, the more intricate the complication, the 
more distinctness and force is there in the product. 



XVIII. 

CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 

631. Almost every writer upon the philosophy of 
Mind has had occasion to complain of the unfitness of 
language, laden as it is with colloquial ambiguities, for 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 247 

conveying with precision and certainty abstract ideas 
and intellectual distinctions. These complaints are 
well founded, and the inconveniences referred to are to 
be obviated as best we may by aid of abundant illus- 
trations and by some repetitions. 

632. And yet this admitted defectiveness of popular 
language, when we must use it as the medium of ana- 
lytic and abstract thought, is balanced by a compensa- 
tion which we meet with on another ground. If lan- 
guage conveys intellectual and moral notions defect- 
ively, it nevertheless brings before us, in the most 
unexceptionable manner, that mass of facts with which 
we are concerned in the fields of Mental Philosophy. 
A language which well meets the wants of a people 
among whom human nature has freely developed itself, 
and which answers the requirements of the intellectual, 
the practical, the poetical, the moral, and the religious 
life, contains in its vast stores a trustworthy index to 
every fact of the people's consciousness : these stores 
are vouchers for every thing which the mind of the 
people has actually realized within reach of these de- 
partments of thought, of action, and of feeling. 

633. To this voluminous index of the thought and 
feeling, and of the infinitely varied experiences of all 
orders of Mind, we may make our appeal with perfect 
confidence. This index will not — it can not lead us 
astray. Whatever is contained in the Language of a 
people is contained also in the Mind of the people. 
When words are put together in sentences or proposi- 
tions, they may affirm what is not real or true, but the 
words which are so put together are infallible evidence 
of the existence either of things seen and known, or of 
notions or feelings proper to the human mind. 



248 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

634. If I affirm that a ghost appeared to me yester- 
night, and gave me such and such information, this af- 
firmation may be wholly untrue ; for what actually oc- 
curred might Tbe either a trick practiced upon me, or it 
might "be a Tbranular illusion. But now the word Ghost, 
which is a term colloquially current, and to which an 
idea of some sort, even if it be vague, is attached by all 
who hear it, this word is index to a fact in human na- 
ture, namely, the belief, every where prevalent, of un- 
earthly or supernatural appearances. This belief, then, 
is a fact belonging to the philosophy of the human 
mind. 

635. If I affirm that the hearing of music and the 
sight of beauty in nature excite emotions which are not 
derived from any "association of ideas," or from any 
circuitous or factitious sources, this may be true or not 
true. But it is certain that the words Harmony, Beau- 
ty, Melody, Sublimity, and also all those words that 
are expressive of the feelings and tastes excited by 
sounds, and by sights of a certain order, are sure in- 
dices of facts in human nature, and they are facts which 
Mental Philosophy ought to take account of. 

636. Or if we take up, as the leading terms in a 
class, the words Love, Sympathy, Compassion, and oth- 
ers resembling these, or their synonyms, and then bring 
together, under and around these, the many hundred 
words and forms of speech which are of kindred im- 
port, we have then in view a vast mass of facts indic- 
ative ol certain principal elements of human nature, 
and of certain usual combinations and interactions of 
these elements. 

637. I may affirm concerning Love, and Sympathy, 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OP THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 249 

and Compassion, and Benevolence, and Philanthropy, 
many things that are untrue, or illusory, or extrava- 
gant, but it is certain that if the notions that are ex- 
cited in most minds by these words, and by the cus- 
tomary combinations of them, were wholly illusory and 
unreal, in that case no cqpia verborum so rich as this, 
relating to the social emotions, would ever have found 
a place in the language of any people. Instead of sev- 
eral hundred words and phrases of this order, a half 
dozen terms, or fewer still, would amply have supplied 
the needs of the mind in expressing whatever it is 
conscious of in its relations with other minds. 

638. There has always been much controversy on 
this ground. Wherever men have given themselves to 
the pursuit of Analytic Thought, a strenuous endeavor 
has been made to resolve certain emotions and feelings 
into their supposed elements, and in tracing them to 
such elements, to show that the popular belief con- 
cerning them is illusory. 

639. Besides the legitimate philosophic impulse to 
analyze whatever may indeed be analyzed, there is a 
strong tendency in minds of a certain class — the sple- 
netic and sarcastic by temperament — to denounce, or to 
ridicule as hypocrisy and pretense whatever in human 
nature wears the aspect of generosity, sincerity, mag- 
nanimity, virtue. Hence it has happened that the strict 
annalist, who is usually a man of mere reason, and of 
little or no feeling, has found willing coadjutors in the 
class of the brilliant and flippant, who win an easy tri- 
umph in exhibiting human nature vilified and brought 
down to their own level. 

640. So far as abstract discussion and argument 

L2 



250 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

may actually have an influence in the formation of our 
moral dispositions, it is important — in truth, nothing 
is more important in the region of Mental Philosophy 
than that we should well understand the grounds of 
the controversy which is just now in view. 

641. Those facts of the case now before us which 
admit of no dispute are these : the language of every 
people that is advanced in civilization and in moral 
consciousness abounds with words and phrases ex- 
pressive of benign emotions belonging to the relation- 
ships of domestic and civil life. These familiar words 
and phrases carry a meaning, more or less deep and 
full, into all minds ; and they carry a meaning that is 
perfectly distinguishable from certain other words and 
phrases, which are employed antithetically, such as the 
words self-love and selfishness. 

642. Farther than this, it is a fact not questioned 
that what may be called the antagonistic words and 
phrases, or those which designate the opposite emo- 
tions, such as Anger, Hatred, Malice, Revenge, Envy, 
and many more, are truly understood by all men, learn- 
ed and unlearned, when taken as expressive of genuine 
and uncompounded states of mind. Thus it has never 
been affirmed, either by philosophers or by satirists, 
that hatred is a mere disguise of love, or that revenge 
is a circuitous form of benevolence, or that envy and 
jealousy are well-wishing hypocrisies or amiable pre- 
texts. We all take these terms to mean just what 
they appear to mean ; nor have the most severe ana- 
lysts of human nature forbidden us to entertain this, 
which is our spontaneous persuasion. 

643. The only controversy which has ever been 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 251 

urged on this ground is that relating to the import of 
the first-named class of words, of which Love, Sym- 
pathy, Compassion, Benevolence, Philanthropy, arc 
among the principal. On the one hand it is affirmed, 
consonantly with the spontaneous suggestions of our 
consciousness, that Love, Sympathy, Compassion, Be- 
nevolence, are pure elements in human nature, and that 
they are not resolvable into any forms or disguises of 
self-love or selfishness. But, on the other side, by 
those who profess to follow a more strict analysis, it is 
affirmed that there are no emotions whatever which 
may not, when rigidly scrutinized and reduced to their 
constituents, be shown to be nothing more than reflex 
forms of that one sovereign impulse which urges each 
individual to pursue his separate and insulated good ; 
in other words, that there is no Love which is not 
Self-love ; no Sympathy which is not " a feeling for 
myself;" no Benevolence of which "my particular 
ease, comfort, and welfare" is not the reason — the be- 
ginning and the end. 

644. How shall so grave a question as this be de- 
cided ? Never by the means of logical argumentation. 
Herein it resembles the question already spoken of 
concerning the Freedom of the Will, or the proper 
causality of Mind. It is a question concerning ele- 
ments in human nature, and therefore it admits of no 
other direct proof than that furnished by an appeal to 
every one's consciousness. Then there is this peculiar 
difficulty attaching to the question concerning the sim- 
plicity and genuineness of the benign emotions, namely, 
that among those who take part in such a controversy, 
there are many (and especially those who take the 



252 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

negative side) whose personal consciousness answers 
very doubtfully to the appeal which we must make to 
it. Not only are there multitudes of persons from 
whose natures the benign affections have almost been 
expelled by the indulgence of evil dispositions, but 
there are more than a few in whom the moral life is 
constitutionally so feeble that scarcely is- a pulsation 
of the social emotions to be perceived in them : they 
have no unquestionable consciousness of this order. 
Such persons, therefore, will think themselves war- 
ranted in denying, as to other men, that of which they 
find no clear indications in themselves. 

645. At first sight it may seem strange that, while 
the malign emotions have been admitted to be unmixed 
and genuine, or to be, in fact, what they appear to be, 
the benign affections are alleged to be factitious, and 
that they carry colors which a stern philosophy is 
bound to snatch from them. The reason of this ap- 
parent inconsistency is not very remote. 

646. On the rarest occasions only is there any temp- 
tation to simulate the benign passions, or to pretend 
to hate where we do not hate. Seldom indeed, if ever, 
do we feign envy or jealousy ; seldom, if ever, are we 
false in falseness. Therefore it is that, as to the 
malign affections, there are no current counterfeits of 
them : such as they seem to be, such they are. 

647. It need scarcely be said that the case is the 
very reverse of this as to the benign affections. Love 
and Benevolence are indeed the fine gold and the silver 
of the social economy ; they constitute a medium that 
is intrinsically valuable, and therefore it is that the 
temptation to pass a base imitation of them is almost 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 253 

irresistibly strong ; and therefore it is that when rigid 
analysts or sardonic writers address themselves to the 
task of convincing the deluded world that gold is brass, 
and that silver is tin, and that rubies and sapphires 
are colored glass, they find at hand piles of instances 
fit for the establishment of their doctrine ; and if ten 
are not enough, they can bring forward a hundred, or 
a thousand, or as many more as you will ask for. 

648. It would be quite beside our purpose in this 
book to enter upon any ground of controversy ; never- 
theless, it is unavoidable that we should refer, in pass- 
ing, to grave questions when they are of a kind that 
touch first principles, and that take effect upon the 
opinions of educated persons. Such is this question 
concerning the genuineness and the elementary sim- 
plicity of the benign affections. We advert to it, and 
must continue to do so as we go on ; yet, in doing so, 
it is not on the presumption (which would only lead 
to disappointment) that those who deliberately take 
the contrary side may be brought over to what we 
think a better opinion, but for this sole purpose — that 
those who, by the constitution of their minds, are open 
to the reception of this (as we believe) better philos- 
ophy, should be aided in ridding themselves of the 
entanglements of (as we believe) a worse philosophy. 

649. The born blind make great attainments by 
means of the senses they possess — hearing, touch, 
taste, and smell — in acquiring a knowledge of the 
external world, and, so far as it goes, it is true and 
exact knowledge. But now, if to one born blind, 
sight, with its acquired perceptions, be given, then, if 
you ask him what the universe is, such as he now 



254 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

knows it to be, his answer will show how immeasur- 
ably far the perceptions of sight surpass all other per- 
ceptions taken together in bringing us into correspond- 
ence with the real world ; the real world is that world 
with which the eye is conversant : light is knowledge 
as to all things material. 

650. Then, when we put this question; The world 
of Mind, what is it ? It is such as to its primary ele- 
ments as we have already enumerated them in our 
catalogue. But beyond this, the world of Mind (the 
brute mind now quite forgotten) is the world of sym- 
pathies and of Love. 

651. If any ask me "What is Love?" I have — I 
can only have one answer for them, and it is as reason- 
able an answer as that which I give to the question 
"What is Light?" Light is that of which you are 
conscious in daytime when the eyes are open. Love 
is that of which you are conscious when a being like 
in nature to yourself is thought of or is in your view, 
and who has become the object of emotions of the same 
order as those that relate to your individual well- 
being, but which are immeasurably more intense and 
profound. 

652. If you tell me that you have no consciousness 
to which any such statement could in sober truth 
apply, and that you are never so absurd as to forget 
yourself in your regard for another, I have only this 
to say, I can not teach you so to feel. You may re- 
monstrate, and may affirm, and may truly affirm con- 
cerning yourself that you are reputed among your 
neighbors to be a kind-hearted person ; that you are 
not untouched with a spectacle of suffering ; that you 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 255 

enjoy the sight of the happiness of those around you ; 
that you believe yourself to Tbe conscious- of love, and 
you think that love is one of those ingredients in 
human nature which may be analyzed ; and that the 
mode of its origin in our minds, by help of certain 
" trains of association," may convincingly be shown; 
and you tell me, moreover, that this has actually been 
done, with great precision, by several noted writers, 
as thus : 

653. " The states of circumstances in which the 
feeling (friendship, here taken to stand as the generic 
term for Love) originates are very numerous. But 
they are all, without exception, of one kind. They 
are all states of circumstances in which a greater pro- 
portion than usual of our own pleasures come to be 
associated with the idea of the individual." "Com- 
munity of pursuits" may be the origin of such feelings: 
" the idea of the individual, upon the whole, is a highly 
pleasurable idea." Besides, our knowledge of "his 
benevolence toward us makes us count upon his serv- 
ices whenever they are required, and his reputation 
and influence in the world are such as to give weight 
to his endeavors." This is, indeed, an intelligible 
philosophy of love, and so is the following : 

654. " The idea of a man enjoying a train of pleas- 
ures or happiness is felt by every body to be a pleasur- 
able idea. The idea of a man under a train of suffer- 
ings or pains is equally felt to be a painful idea. This 
can arise from nothing but the association of our own 
pains with the second. We never feel any pains or 
pleasures but our own.'''' 

655. Nothing can be more intelligible than this 



256 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

analysis of the social affections. It exhausts the sub- 
ject so far as it is understood, or so far as it has ever 
entered into the consciousness of a man of frigid, cal- 
culating intellectuality — a man whose views and opin- 
ions are ruled by the fibrous and wordy structure of 
his own mind. To minds of this class — and it is such, 
often, that have given us our notions of the philosophy 
of human nature — whatever can not be set out in prop- 
ositions, whatever can not be spread out in paragraphs 
and chapters, is as nothing. Writers of this order say, 
what is quite true when they say it of themselves, We 
know of nothing which we can not make known to 
others in words ; we have no consciousness of any 
thing which pretends to be incommunicable in that 
mode. 

656. There can be little need to affirm a truism 
such as this — "that we never feel any pains or pleas- 
ures but our own." Yet it is well to remember that 
there are emotions far surpassing all others in depth 
and force, which have no direct bearing upon pains or 
pleasures, enjoyments or suffering, either our own or 
those of others. Pains and pleasures, enjoyments and 
sufferings, and the ideas of both, come to cluster around 
such emotions, and they are seldom far remote from 
them, but they are not of their substance. It is at 
this point that logical utilitarianism and political-econ- 
omy philosophy lose the path, and egregiously misin- 
terpret human nature. 

657. The notion that nothing is real but the good 
things of life is the bottom truth (falsehood say) of 
some modern systems. Theories which plant the right 
foot upon atheism will be seen to plant the left foot 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 257 

upon sensuousness, or, as it is called, for euphemy 
sake, "material good." If we build our belief upon 
this basis, then it is a matter of course that Love is 
that emotion which ensues when a " greater proportion 
than usual of oar own pleasures comes to be associ- 
ated with the idea of the individual" (loved). And if 
we are content to build our philosophy of the world of 
Mind upon this basis, then it is certain that friendship 
is nothing more than the feeling we entertain toward 
any one of whose benevolence toward us we are as- 
sured, and upon whose " services we may reckon when 
required," and whose " reputation and influence in the 
world are such as to give weight to his endeavors." 

658. The world of Mind is, as we believe, suscepti- 
ble of an interpretation differing essentially from this, 
and it has depths immeasurably deeper than these 
shallows. But as in regard to certain intellectual fac- 
ulties — the power of abstraction especially — and as in 
regard to certain tastes — the sense of the sublime and 
beautiful, for instance — and as in regard to certain 
moral perceptions, individual minds, nay, many such, 
are totally wanting in these elements, so as to Love 
(not as a phase of selfishness) there are multitudes of 
beings — worthy people too — to whom it is utterly un- 
known. This fact may be perplexing, but it is not in 
any way questionable. 

659. The tendency of philosophic thinking in recent 
times has taken a direction toward the well-being of 
the masses of mankind — the industrial, and the classes 
below these — the indigent. But this tendency, good 
and benevolent as it is, and from which many impor- 
tant reforms have sprung, has been to vulgarize phi- 



258 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

losophy itself. With a show of demonstrative sim- 
plicity and certainty, and with the help of tables and 
statistics, it has carried its dogmas triumphantly, t /?rs£ 
Tby excluding from its regards whatever may not read- 
ily he put into propositions, and secondly by claiming 
great merit on the ground of its practical bearing upon 
the intelligible interests of the " masses.' - 

660. The human system as a social mass is clus- 
tered, and grouped, and cemented, not by Love merely, 
but by various sympathies — by instincts, by commu- 
nities of interest and taste, by congruities of feeling, 
and by antipathies and antagonisms ; for whatever 
acts as a repellent force in one direction does not fail 
to act also as a force of cohesion in another direction. 
Looking abroad, therefore, upon the social economy, 
and seeing it thus bound together by many affinities, 
philosophers of a certain class, or men of mere reason, 
destitute themselves of these emotions that have a 
deeper seat, deny the reality of what has never entered 
into their personal consciousness ; nor do they encoun- 
ter abroad any facts of an obtrusive kind which may 
not easily be reduced to system, or be made to har- 
monize with a sensuous and selfish theory of human 
nature. 

661. Those who would gladly adhere to a better 
philosophy than this may find the means of confirming 
themselves in their belief of it by following a clew of 
analogy, as thus : in every advance which we make 
beyond the instincts and the sensuousness of infancy, 
we acquire, as already said, the habit of reflex con- 
sciousness, and of meditation upon our individual lot 
and condition ; we become thoughtful in the chronolog- 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 259 

ical sense ; and in thinking more of the past and more 
of the future, we live less upon the hour now passing. 

662. In minds of the commonest order, this habit 
turns much or entirely upon the pains and pleasures, 
the animal good and ill, that may have attached to the 
individual lot, and that are likely to attach to it in fu- 
ture. But in proportion as the mind, by original 
structure, is of a higher type, and in proportion to its 
culture also, and as its emotions come to be of a purer 
and more expansive order, and as the views of life are 
less contracted, in this proportion the meditation of 
self, the individualizing consciousness, is less and less 
exclusively occupied with pains and pleasures, past or 
anticipated ; the individual feeling contains less of the 
character of simple self-regard. What is it, or how 
shall we give expression to that order of feeling which 
supervenes, and which dislodges the selfism, and which 
brings into the place of it a broader consciousness — a 
consciousness of being — pains or pleasures, good or 
ill, not considered — life not thought of as desirable or 
as undesirable ? 

663. Now a step onward from this point is before 
us. We have said more than once that, in human 
nature, whatever comes to act at a point remote from 
its source shows more force and develops more the 
energies of Mind than that which is proximate and 
simply organic. 

664. Assume, then, this, that a personal conscious- 
ness, remote, as far as may be, from sensuousness, and 
from selfishness, and from sinister calculation — assume 
it to be in daily communion with one who is fitted to 
become the object and centre of an order of feeling not 



260 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

resembling this, but identical with it. From this feel- 
ing the idea of self has been expelled, and that which 
occupies the consciousness is that which it would be 
absurd to attempt to make known by analysis or by 
description, for it is a pure element, and it can be 
known only in so far as it is felt. 

665. It is quite true that Love must always desire, 
and that it will seek to promote the welfare of its ob- 
ject, and that it will do, and dare, and endure all things 
to avert suffering or privation from its object. But 
these desires, and these cares and labors, are incidental 
to Love ; they are not of its substance. 

666. When we affirm, as we must, that multitudes 
of persons, and many estimable people too, have no 
consciousness of any emotions beyond those which 
may easily be described, and which may be traced to 
their sources in a better sort of selfishness, it must 
not be inferred that emotions of a deeper quality are 
rare, as exotics, or that they are mere refinements no- 
where to be met with but in the high temperature of 
Platonic saloons. It is not so : genuine love is the 
broad substratum of the social system in all ranks ; it 
spreads itself out to the sun at the doors of cottages 
as well as in saloons. Love, deep, warm — absolutely 
unselfish and martyr-like as to devotedness,«-is often 
rough-handed and rough- visaged, and homely too in its 
utterances. Love is, indeed, very choice as to some 
of its conditions ; it is keenly discriminative, but it is 
not fastidious. 

667. We must not look for Love in any such places 
as these — not in the lower conditions of savage life, 
nor among the most degraded and wretched beings of 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 261 

a dense population. We must not look for Love 
among the sensual and profligate, nor among the sor- 
did, and penurious, and calculating, nor among those 
whose sympathies have long Ibeen quite worn out by 
the attritions of a factitious existence amid frivolous 
pleasures and amusements. We must not look for 
Love in the hearts or homes of the proud, or the sul- 
len, or the malign, or the jealous, or the egotistic. But 
when we have made these and such like necessary ex- 
ceptions, then we may confidently look for Love in all 
ranks, and we shall find it, fresh and pure, in many a 
home from which fastidious tastes and cultured habits 
would impel one to shrink ; we shall find it in homes 
which it is a delight to look into for an hour, but in 
which it might be a severe trial to abide as an inmate 
for a week. 

668. Those domestic instincts and those quick sym- 
pathies which so usefully take their range within the 
social system, and which prevail, for longer or shorter 
periods, in every home circle — these emotions, which 
form the ordinary cement of our social existence, have 
this characteristic, that they are temporary in their 
hold, and are more or less easily transferable from per- 
son to person. Endurance, and inconvertibility, and 
fixedness upon its object is the characteristic of Love, 
as it is distinguished from the benign sympathies, and 
from any sort of fondness that is merely instinctive. 
Love challenges for itself immortality, and its surest 
criterion is the passionate grasp it takes of the word 
forever. 

669. Fond instincts, and kindly sympathies, and be- 
nevolent impulses— these are solderings of the social 



262 THE WOELD OP MIND. 

system, without Avhich nothing could retain its place in 
the machinery of life ; but Love is a welding, in con- 
sequence of which the two masses constitute thereafter 
one substance. 

670. We have said that Love, although it is never 
indifferent to the pains and pleasures of the person 
loved, exists irrespectively of these, and still more ab- 
solutely is it remote from a calculating regard to its 
own pains and pleasures, thought of as derivable from 
him or her. But there is another characteristic of 
this genuine emotion which demonstrates how deep it 
is rooted in human- nature. Love, although it can 
never be indifferent to the moral qualities of its ob- 
ject, may exist and may endure irrespectively of these. 
Love is persistent when complacency and approval 
have quite died away. We ought to believe that even 
this power of endurance will find its limit somewhere, 
but such a limit will be found far beyond the bounda- 
ries where we must place it if we follow the guidance 
of a self-seeking theory of human nature. 

671. Although Love is not irrational, it is not in its 
nature to be reasoning : it is anterior to considerations 
that are approvable to reason ; it is deeper seated than 
discretion, because it is deeper seated than that self- 
love with which discretion has to do. Upon this 
foundation, where it exists, the social sympathies, the 
feelings of general good-will and kindliness, as well as 
some more intimate affections, take their position, and 
give coherence to the domestic system. But even 
these less profound feelings strike deeper than that 
reflex selfism into which the social emotions have been 
resolved by some writers. In the vivid emotion of 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 263 

sympathy with suffering, and in the outbursts of com- 
passion, and in the impulse to relieve distress, there is 
no calculation — there is no running in-doors to see 
how this case of suffering may touch us at home. It 
is a direct and spontaneous emotion, uncompounded, 
pure in its intention, and repellent of every sinister 
suggestion of cold discretion. 

672. It may be true that Dives, and, in like man- 
ner, his descendants in every age, will wish that Laz- 
arus would lay himself down any where else rather 
than on the steps of his mansion, and it may be true 
that he would not grudge to send him a mess of sa- 
vory meat, only it must not be eaten within sight of 
the rich man ; but it is not true that the man of Sa- 
maria, who made a halt upon a dangerous path, did so 
for the purpose of relieving himself from the disagree- 
able sight and the painful recollection of a man bleed- 
ing and dying without help. Philosophical analysis 
may be at home while it is dissecting easy sympathies 
such as those of Dives, but it proves itself to be ut- 
terly blind when it attempts to handle human nature, 
such as it is developed in the breast of the compas- 
sionate Samaritan. 

673. The intense maternal fondness may be regard- 
ed as in part an animal instinct, and, so far as it is so, 
human nature may seem to differ from the brute na- 
ture only in degrees of feeling. But there are in- 
stances — and they are not rare — which stand clear of 
this ambiguity, and which carry momentous conse- 
quences. Even if such instances loere rare, they 
would yet be conclusive; but they are of frequent 
and common occurrence, and they may easily be found. 



264 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

if only we have an eye to see them. Take so familiar 
an instance as this • 

674. In a January afternoon a freezing sleet is driv- 
ing through a dismal court of a murky town. Upon 
the wet and muddy steps of a hovel I find a child 
seated. She is not naked, though it can barely be 
said that she is clothed. She hugs an infant on her 
knees, blue-visaged and squalid. She is pulling and 
pulling her own tattered skirt this way and that, so as, 
if possible, to screen the blain-smitted feet of the baby 
from wet and wind. Why does she sit there? Her 
mother has gone out, and has locked the door, and has 
told her to take care of baby till she comes back ; and 
she does so ; but she does it, not from teaching or from 
imitation, nor yet to save herself from cuffs when her 
mother returns ; she does it from no reflex or self-re- 
gardful feeling ; she does it because human nature is 
built upon a broad basis of genuine sympathies — a 
foundation as broad as are those thousand forms of 
misery and degradation among which the human fam- 
ily has sunk down. 

675. The mystery of these miseries and degrada- 
tions human thought hitherto has not cleared up : a 
dark abyss it is ; but there is at least one aspect of 
the subject whereupon a light shines. If there be mis- 
ery and degradation in the world, yet a provision is 
made, and it is a large provision, and it is ready at 
hand, and it is quick in its application, and it is fit for 
assuaging suffering and for lightening the weight of 
care , it is a provision of sympathies, not, indeed, sur- 
passing the occasion, but yet it is always tending to- 
ward a commensurate extent. 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 265 

676. When we complain, as so often we do, and 
justly may, of the selfishness of mankind, the real 
meaning of all such complaints is this : that whereas 
human nature, broadly distinguished as it is on this 
ground from the brute natures around us, includes 
feelings which, if they were always in vigor, would 
entirely prevent or remove many causes of suffering, 
and would mitigate what they must fail to remove : 
these sympathies are quite wanting in some minds, and 
are feeble in many minds, and are counteracted or are 
vitiated by malign impulses in many. Human nature 
is sympathizing in its structure, but too often it is 
wanting in these elements. 

677. The social system receives its life and warmth 
from Love, much as the earth receives both from the 
beams of the sun ; yet this genial influence is slow in 
taking effect. But sympathy is as the lightning; it 
is quick as thought ; it waits not to make its selec- 
tions ; it is irrespective of considerations, and of par- 
tialities, and of tastes, and of cold prudence. 

678. If the stone on which I have set my foot proves 
to be loose, I catch hold of my companion's arm, and 
I do so without ceremony or the intervention of a 
thought ; or if I see that my companion is in danger 
of a fall, I catch hold of his arm to save him without 
ceremony or the intervention of a thought ; or if on 
my path I find some one — a stranger — who has just 
fallen and has broken a limb, and is bleeding, I start 
forward without ceremony or the intervention of a 
thought (on the supposition that I am no descendant 
of the priest or of the Levite). Now, when I come 
near to the suffering man, how does the sight of his 

M 



266 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

wounds and the hearing of his moans affect me ? To 
answer this question, let me suppose, instead of the 
case before us, that 

679. I am myself the sufferer ; and now I not only 
see a compound fracture, but feel it. The organic sen- 
sation in this case is doubtless much more intense and 
vivid than any sympathy can be in the other case, but 
yet the sympathy takes a much deeper hold of the 
mind than the pain does. The bodily pain is all my 
own ; it is a definite ill ; I know the worst of it ; I 
bear it with a manly resolution, and I calmly look 
about for the means, if there are any at hand, for get- 
ting myself relief. But the sympathy that is excited 
by the suffering of another wakes up my whole na- 
ture, constituted as I am. This emotion so spreads 
itself throughout me as that mind and body are corn- 
moved at once, and both are roused to action, and all 
take this one direction toward the sufferer ; and where- 
as, in the other supposed case, I should endeavor to 
help myself at the suggestion of reason merely, now 
that another is the sufferer, reason does its part at the 
impulse of many concurrent feelings. 

680. In these outgoings of spontaneous sympathy, 
Love may be present or not present. The two kinds 
of emotion are clearly distinguishable, and they are 
more often found apart than conjoined. But the sym- 
pathies consort themselves in several different modes 
with the instincts that are peculiar to the domestic 
system, and in this combination they become so inti- 
mately commingled one with another as not to be dis- 
tinguishable. With composite emotions of this kind, 
Love mingles itself in greater or in less degrees ; very 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 267 

feebly sometimes, even where instinctive sympathies 
are vivid and intense. 

681. The domestic scheme of life includes a set of 
emotions which well enough subserve the purposes 
toward which, obviously, they are related, even when 
there is a very small admixture of Love. But when 
Love, as a fixed, permanent affection, binding together 
individual persons, is superadded to domestic instincts, 
then there takes place an entire absorption of all self- 
intending desires and thoughts, and a supervention of 
emotions which have become homogeneous, as if by 
the incandescence and fusion of the elements. This 
ultimate product must ever defy philosophy, for no 
analysis of it can be effected, no explanation given of 
its origin, no forecasting of what it may issue in, or 
the course of action it may lead to. 

682. The conjugal affection, and the parental, and, 
in a lower sense, perhaps, the filial and the fraternal 
— these affections are but several modes of one species 
of feeling, and it is that in human nature which by 
itself (though it be not alone) would bespeak for man 
more than the brief term of existence which the present 
life affords him. 

683. An elementary book is not the place for say- 
ing what might be said of the deepest of all human 
affections, that of the conjugal relationship. We drop 
this subject, therefore, and we take up that which 
stands next in order, namely, the parental and filial. 

684. In human nature, whatever we meet with that 
is the best and the most rare, and which stands highest 
in the scale of intelligence, or of moral action, or of 
feeling, is to be taken as the genuine, or the normal 



268 THE WOULD OF MIND. 

instance, and as the true sample of the mass. What- 
ever falls below the highest mark is to he regarded as 
a departure from the canon ; it is an accidental abate- 
ment or a default which we need not take account of. 
The mean instance of human excellence is not to be re- 
garded as a fair sample of humanity any more than 
we should take as a representative of the human form 
an individual, one of whose limbs was only a quarter 
of an inch shorter than the other ; for to do so would 
not be warrantable on the plea that men may be 
found one of whose limbs, instead of a quarter of an 
inch, is four inches shorter than the other. If the 
question be. What is the human form? we answer, 
" You sec it in the Apollo and in the Venus." 

685. Or if the question be this : To how great a 
remove from that pure selfism of which a dry philos- 
ophy takes account, human nature may advance, we 
may find an answer among instances which, if they 
are not the most common, are far from being infrequent 
— that of the parent and the child ; or let us now say, 
the father and the daughter. In many, many a home, 
these so stand related in love as that the self-thought 
of both has passed off, and can be detected in no in- 
stance of conduct on either side. If we thus take as 
our instance the father rather than the mother, it is 
because the maternal relationship includes an instinc- 
tive fondness, which is not easily set off when we are 
thinking merely of the parental sentiment. The con- 
ditions of a parental affection into the composition of 
which there enters nothing of selfishness are these two : 

686. The first is this, that the personal feeling of 
the two beings is still distinctly conserved by aid of 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 269 

those reserves, those delicacies, those conventional 
habitudes which belong to the paternal and filial re- 
lationship ; for the more the individuality ot any two 
beings is conserved, so much the more intense will be 
that affection which binds them together, and which 
dispels the selfishness of both. The second of these 
conditions is this : that the cementing love of the two 
should have a well-defined channel of its own, not open 
to interference from any bordering affection. The pater- 
nal and the filial fondness may run parallel with other, 
and even with some much more vivid affections, and 
yet may maintain its entireness. 

687. The ordinary occasions of domestic life do not 
fail to call forth the sympathies, just as the surface of 
a deep water is rippled by the showers and gusts that 
pass hourly across it. These sympathies, deepened 
more or less by moral habits, may, if we please, be 
taken as inclusive of all that is needed to bind together 
the members of a family. And, indeed, in many in- 
stances there is nothing more; how, then, can it be 
proved that there are in human nature any depths 
deeper than these ? This can not be proved ; for what 
we intend more than this is a simple element of con- 
sciousness, which has no constituents, and which, 
therefore, can admit of no verbal explication. 

688. Moral considerations, religious motives also, 
and the exercise of the sympathies, are proper means 
for correcting whatever there may be of self-love 
amounting to selfishness. This sort of counteraction 
there may be room for even among the unselfish. But 
self-love or self-seeking, whether it tends toward self- 
ishness or not, yields to a far more thorough process 



27C THE WORLD OF MIND. 

of exclusion than this when an affection of the purer 
kind supervenes, and leaves no place for emotions of 
inferior quality. 

689. A style of behavior and a course of conduct 
springing from an affection of this kind between father 
and daughter may, to the eye, be scarcely distinguish- 
able from a style of behavior and a course of conduct 
which has its rise in reasons and motives of a very 
different order, namely, from a sense of duty, and 
from a conscientious regard to the fifth commandment. 
Filial duty, when it is thus based upon piety, is always 
to be commended ; nor shall it fail of its reward. But 
this species of affection and this order of behavior is 
wide of our subject ; for what we are intending is a 
blending and welding in human nature which Nature 
herself provides for, and which may or may not in- 
clude the moral virtues. 

690. It is under its purely physical aspect that we 
are now making inquiry concerning the structure and 
functions of the human mind as socially constituted. 
Now this structure includes and provides for the de- 
velopment of affections in the depths of which self- 
emotions are superseded, or are subjected to a process 
of entire sublimation. 

691. The particular case we have adduced above 
has just this argumentative value, that it offers itself 
in a more distinct and a less ambiguous manner than 
some other cases ; but with those whose own con- 
sciousness supplies them with parallel instances, this 
one will be accepted as proof enough of our doctrine 
concerning human nature. Grant it as true that Mind 
in man includes emotions and affections to which no 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 271 

process of analysis, resting on the hypothesis of self- 
ism, is applicable, and then we have the key to a world 
of facts in human history, private and public, which 
otherwise are wholly inexplicable. 

692. It is not merely in the secluded world of the 
home affections, but it is also in the noisy world of 
common life, and it is on the conspicuous theatre of 
historic life, that we may find, if not thousands of in- 
stances, yet tens of instances of great actions, patient 
endeavors, immolations, silent heroisms, in explication 
of which we must either frankly accept a deep -going 
theory of human nature, or, if we will not do so, then 
we must be content cynically to shrug the shoulders, 
and bring our speculations to a close in such terms as 
these : Surely human nature, such as it displays itself 
in some men and women, is a most unaccountable af- 
fair ; for myself, I am no hero, and shall never act the 
martyr ; nor do I profess to understand any sort of 
behavior which a reasonable man can never make in- 
telligible to himself as related to himself." 

693. The World of Mind, regarded physically, ex- 
hibits a process ordained of Nature, the intention of 
which is to raise upon the elements of the individual 
life the broad and multiform superstructure of the so- 
cial life, and to give this foundation an almost unfath- 
omable depth. 

694. The order of Nature in pursuit of this end is 
this, as we have in part already traced it — personal 
consciousness, with its well-defined feeling of individ- 
uality, is promoted by that early interaction of the ac- 
tive and passive rudiments of Mind of which we have 
spoken (343-349, 364). The varying incidents of com- 



272 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

mon life, with its alternations of good and ill, give a 
still more decisive form to the same concentrative hab- 
it, and serve to build up the individual man. Every 
day's intercourse with others has the same effect : mo- 
tives of reserve, even toward the most intimate among 
these, strengthens and consolidates the munition within 
which the individual plants himself and holds his own. 

695. This process of individualization is a neces- 
sary preparation for sustaining the superstructure of 
the social emotions and affections. There must be a 
fixed reticence, and a seclusive and repellent feeling 
where there are to be social habitudes, and a binding 
together by the cement of deep-felt affections. Apart 
from this personal insulation— this conscious inde- 
pendence — this repulsion, men might, indeed, herd to- 
gether as do gregarious animals, but they would not 
congregate or become cemented in families. 

696. Inroads are soon made upon this seclusive feel- 
ing, first by the urgent wants and the conscious weak- 
nesses of the individual, and then by his spontaneous 
sympathies toward others in their wants and suffer- 
ings. These emotions, which (except with inert and 
brute-like natures) are involuntary and instantaneous 
as well as powerful, open for themselves a passage into 
the citadel of the personal reserve : a breach is made 
in the wall, and the man becomes a social being. 

697. When once the social element is quickened, 
then the emotions and affections that belong to it 
spread themselves out in all directions, and lay hold 
of whatever it may be around them to which they can 
attach their tendrils. While it is in the nature of 
selfishness to compact itself more and more every day, 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 273 

it is in the nature of the social sympathies and affec- 
tions to strengthen themselves continually by expan- 
sion and amplification, and by a softening, and a 
growth, and a striking of their roots deeper, and send- 
ing them further. 

698. Whatever may lbe the requirements of virtue, 
they can only be such as are in conformity with the 
original structure of the human mind. We have al- 
ready affirmed (216-221) that a consistent belief of 
the reality of a moral system demands the doctrine of 
the initiative causality of Mind — a doctrine to be held 
in the most absolute and unexceptive sense. What we 
have now to affirm is this, that Virtue, if it is to be a 
reality, and is to be in harmony with the structure of 
the human mind, must assume the physical fact that 
the social sympathies and affections in man are direct 
emanations, and that when they are genuine, or so far 
as they are genuine, they include no reflective or re- 
verberative reaction upon self — no calculations of con- 
sequences affecting self. The sympathies and the af- 
fections, so far as they are true, are also pure rudiments 
upon which Virtue rests its requirements, or, as we 
might say, they are elements which Virtue finds, and 
which it takes up and assimilates. 

699. Frequent and grievous have ever been the 
complaints of the apathy and the selfishness of man- 
kind. But what is the interpretation which we should 
put upon these petulant moanings (and for which, in 
fact, there may be ground enough) ? It is this : That 
whereas in every human heart there is some conscious- 
ness of that which belongs to human nature by its 
very structure, namely, pure sympathies and unselfish 

M2 



274 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

affections, we do not always meet them when and where 
they are needed. If, in fact, there were no such deep- 
seated and instinctive belief, never would any com- 
plaint of this kind have been uttered. 

700. "We all echo these complaints as often as oc- 
casions arise, and it is scarcely any number of disap- 
pointments that avail to rob us of that" inbred belief 
whence they take their rise. The misanthrope is the 
dissatisfied man who has often and often quarreled 
with himself for retaining it so long : he is ever and 
again calling himself a fool for his own obstination in 
continuing to think well of his fellows. 

701. To save us from these recurrent disappoint- 
ments, and effectively to drive us off from the ground 
where they spring up, the philosopher — the strict an- 
alyst of human nature — proffers his services. He as- 
sures us that we have only ourselves to blame for lis- 
tening to fine verbiage about generosity and disinter- 
estedness, and about honest philanthropy. The honest 
man, and the only one, he says, is he who, while he 
makes open profession of the purest selfishness, takes 
care that his language and his conduct shall always be 
in perfect accordance on this ground. The philoso- 
pher assures us — he has done so in every age, and he 
is doing it now — that, having submitted human mo- 
tives to a process of exact analysis, he finds nothing 
among them that does not turn out to be a form or a 
product of self-love — nothing that is not reducible to 
the reflex motive of a desire for our own individual 
well-being. 

702. The philosopher of this school has never failed 
to find among his contemporaries those who become 



CEMENTING EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 275 

his coadjutors as brilliant popular writers, and who, in 
sparkling style, go about to prove that all men are, in 
fact, as frivolous or as base as the basest and the most 
frivolous of men know themselves to be. Popular fic- 
tion usually takes this level ground, and charges itself 
with the task of proving that human nature is a flimsy 
manufacturer of cardboard, gold leaf, paint, and varnish. 

703. This philosophy and its attendant satire has 
held the same language in every age. The cream of 
both may be found in so small a book as that contain- 
ing; the moral maxims of La Rochefoucauld. These 
"Moral Maxims" might be made use of as a test of 
the quality of minds. By the natively base and the 
debauched they will be swallowed as a sweet morsel, 
feeding self-complacency where self-respect has never 
been. As to souls of a middle and better order, and 
wdio yet cling to what is fair and good, such will peruse 
this collection with a melancholy curiosity, and will 
tremble as they read, lest while they are compelled to 
admit the exactness and precision of the writer's dis- 
sections, they should, in reaching the end, find them- 
selves stripped of whatever hitherto has served to rec- 
oncile them to existence, and has given hopefulness to 
their better purposes. As to vigorous and healthfully 
constituted minds, such will quickly throw these soph- 
isms from them in contempt, and will think it enough 
to recall the writer's position and training, whose mis- 
fortune it was to have seen nothing of humanity but 
what he conversed with in the pestilential stews of the 
most corrupt of profligate courts. 

704. Books of this class, whether philosophic or 
populai", are, in fact, a homage rendered to virtue. 



276 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

There would be no mockery in a world in which there 
was no reality ; there would he no satire if there were 
no goodness and truth. There would have been no 
negative philosophies if there were not in human na- 
ture substance and a ground on which a positive mo- 
rality may be reared. 

705. It is a safe principle, already affirmed, and to 
which we might attribute the authority of an axiom in 
Mental Philosophy, that when A belief, which is spon- 
taneous and universal, works in with the functions of 
the intellectual and moral life, and promotes their har- 
monious interaction, such a belief is not an illusion, 
but a reality ; it is a truth. 

706. If this rule be valid, in no case is its applica- 
tion of more serious consequence than in the bearing 
it takes upon this question of the genuineness of the 
benign social emotions and affections. Let the doc- 
trine be zealously promulgated in philosophic writings 
and in popular literature that nothing is real but self- 
love — selfishness ; and then, so far as this teaching is 
listened to, it will speedily make men as cold and self- 
ish as it tells them that they are. This is a result 
that has been realized often in the history of highly 
sophisticated communities ; it is a process that is al- 
ways going on where the literary taste of a people has 
become vitiated by an abundance of frivolous and sar- 
castic fiction. On the contrary, let domestic training 
and public instruction confidently assume and firmly 
maintain the belief of the genuineness — the simplicity 
— the reality of those sympathies which prompt us to 
aid each other in suffering, and of those profound affec- 
tions which cement the family relationships, and which 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 277 

give warmth and intensity to the endearments of home 
— let children and youths he thus taught, and the re- 
ality which we affirm will actually come into being, and 
flourish around us, and will show its presence in the 
genial happiness it diffuses. Believe in loye, and 
you will love and be loved. 



XIX. 

ANTAGONISTIC EMOTIONS OP THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 

707. The intelligible distinction between Anatomy 
and Morbid Anatomy, between Animal Physiology 
and Nosology, is always regarded by writers in those 
departments of science. Whatever belongs to the 
original structure of animal life, and which is essen- 
tial to its functions, may easily be described and set 
forth apart from those irregular forms and those dis- 
turbed modes of action which take place in conse- 
quence either of violence or of disease, and with which 
the surgeon and the physician have to do. 

708. A distinction quite of the same kind, and 
which is as easily observed, should always be kept in 
view in relation to our present subject. Whatever 
manifestly belongs to the structure of the Mind, and 
which we can not well imagine to be separable from 
it, at least while it is conjoined with animal organiza- 
tion, we claim as our proper province in this element- 
ary book. Therefore it is that, after speaking of the 
Social Emotions, and these chiefly in their benign as- 
pect, we should say something — or something more 



278 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

than has been said — of those antagonistic emotions 
which act as repellent forces within the same system. 
The leading emotion of this class — Anger — we have 
already referred to as necessary to the defense of ani- 
mal life (608), coming in, as it does, to sustain and to 
invigorate the instinct of self-preservation. 

709. But on this ground we advance- only a few 
steps before we touch our limit as above mentioned. 
The antagonistic or protective emotions, indispensable 
as they are to the conservation of a scheme of life 
such as that of this world, am proper to it only while 
they preserve their characteristic evanescence ; the ac- 
cess of the intensity of feeling should be transient. 
When these emotions become congested, when they 
lengthen themselves out and survive the immediate 
occasion, and when, in doing so, they pass into the 
form of affections, dispositions, tempers, then they 
have gone beyond our range, and we assign the treat- 
ment of them to the moralist and the religious teacher. 

710. Defensive anger, if it be cherished and con- 
served, soon ceases to be Anger, for it undergoes a 
speedy transmutation, and, according to the tempera- 
ment and the animal tendencies of the man, it becomes 
chronical and malignant ; in the forms of hatred, envy, 
jealousy, it wraps itself around in purposes of revenge. 
Sometimes it sinks into domestic petulance ; some- 
times it flames out and sets the wide world on fire in 
modes of ambitious destructiveness. Defensive anger, 
thus transmuted and become a temper, when it com- 
bines itself with an inordinate self-esteem, marks itself 
upon the countenance and demeanor as a sullen pride. 
Sullen pride, when it has chanced to incase a too 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 279 

sensitive nature, and has met injustice and ingrati- 
tude, fixes itself upon the unhappy being whom we 
shun as the misanthrope. 

711. But we may well take leave to stand aloof 
from all subjects of this class : they implicate many 
inquiries which are physiological rather than intellect- 
ual ; and, more than this, they are not to be parted off 
from considerations which have a moral and religious 
aspect. We should not merely err in a scientific 
sense, but should give countenance to the most serious 
misconceptions as to the grounds of virtue and piety 
if we should take in hand the task of digesting a phi- 
losophy of evil dispositions and bad tempers on any 
principles that are merely physical. 

712. Some ennobling emotions which are of the 
highest utility in relation to the welfare and progress 
of nations must find a place in this section, although 
it is only in an indirect sense that they can be desig- 
nated as antagonistic. The desire of approbation, and 
ambition, and the love of power, and the thirst for 
posthumous fame — these generous impulses, and many 
varieties of them, connect the individual man with his 
fellows ; they give rise to feelings which are recipro- 
cal, and the sentiments which thence take their rise 
are generally of a benign complexion. Why, then, do 
we class them with such as are merely repellent ? 

713. The reason of such an assortment is this : that 
whereas the purely social affections — love and sym- 
pathy, and the domestic instincts — are wholly of a 
cementing quality, those which we have now to speak 
of do not take effect cohesively until after they have 
acted as repellent forces. The germ of these emotions 



280 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

is an enlarged self-love, or it may better "be called a 
more intense individualism. Minds of this order, and 
it is often the choicest minds that are peculiarly alive 
to the love of approbation, to emulation, to ambition, 
and the love of power, are, more than others, self-re- 
gardful, and yet they may not be, in an evil sense, 
selfish. 

114:. Not only is the germ of these emotions repel- 
lent, but, as they have a peculiar aptitude to run into 
an exaggerated form, they easily become, in a vicious 
sense, anti-social. From out of these feelings dispo- 
sitions too often grow which choke whatever is benev- 
olent, generous, and disinterested. 

715. Hence it has happened that moralists of a cer- 
tain class, in their anxiety to secure the integrity of 
virtue, have not scrupled to denounce these powerful 
impulses as altogether and in every sense evil, and 
they have sternly demanded their excision to the very 
roots. 

716. It is easy to show that this demand, springing 
as it does from an overdone zeal, and instigated by a 
sophisticated morality, is such that, if it were allowed 
to take its course, instead of eradicating these instinct- 
ive emotions, it would give us, in the place of an open- 
faced ambition, confessed and recognized as noble and 
praiseworthy, the changeful colors of a profoundly 
selfish hypocrisy. 

717. What are the facts ? The thirst of applause, 
the desire of fame, the love of power — these, and the 
many kindred feelings which are characteristic of a 
class of minds — the few, are, in truth the correlatives 
of those involuntary emotions which impel all men to 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 281 

admire whatever in work, in achievement, in conduct, 
is indeed worthy of admiration — whatever is pre-emi- 
nently good, or beautiful, or beneficial. Severe mor- 
alists, therefore, who would apply lunar caustic to am- 
bition and to the love of praise, should begin their 
work by showing the multitude how they may go 
about to repress the irresistible impulse to admire, 
and to say aloud that they admire what is great — 
noble ; whatever genius has imagined and patient as- 
siduity has realized on the field of art or on the stage 
of public life. 

718. Should we not think it a preposterous endeav- 
or to quash admiration in the breasts of men and to put 
it to silence ? Yet so long as all men feel what they 
can not but feel, and so long as, with a frank and gen- 
erous candor, they give utterance to these feelings, then 
what sort of self-denial is it which the moralist im- 
poses upon the gifted man upon whom the grateful 
eyes of thousands of his fellows are turned ? Is it a 
possible act ? If it be said, " Give glory to God," we 
heartily assent to this religious injunction ; but the 
man will have nothing to give until after he has felt 
that it is glory which has come into his keeping, and 
which he may now lay upon the altar. 

719. But if, indeed, we could quash admiration, or 
if we could interdict the utterance of it, or if we could 
stop the ears of those who labor to win it, what will 
then become of the social system ? To whom are 
communities to look for promoting their advancement ? 
How shall the minds of the many be fed, taught, lifted 
from the savage and the sensual condition ? Crude 
motives, either of urgent necessity or of mere pay, will 



282 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

not give us those very things which are the most need- 
ed if Mind is to "be mind, and if the life of thought 
and feeling is to prevail over the brute life of appetite 
and instinct. All that is best in every kind, all that 
is rare, and whatever it is among the products of hu- 
man labor which we gaze upon with delight and won- 
der — all these fruits of mind — all must be foregone, 
must be forgotten, and must never again be sought for 
or desired, if we may not allow the desire of fame and 
ambition, and the love of power, to take the place that 
is due to them in our morality. 

720. Among these impulses, the one which would 
be singled out as the most open to reprehension in the 
view of the severe moralist is the love of power, or the 
ambition to occupy the place of command in the gov- 
ernment of nations. But if we denounce the love of 
power as essentially vicious, and if such denunciations 
come to be generally accepted as proper, then what 
must follow is this — that seats of power will be seized 
upon by men who avowedly are destitute of virtue, and 
whose only law is self-love. This is certain, that na- 
tions must be governed — the many by the few. We 
ought, therefore, to invite to the competition the best 
and the highest spirits. 

721. From another quarter, ambition and the love 
of power sometimes receive an interpretation which 
can not fail to vitiate them, and so to damage the 
commonwealth. Writers of a certain school, in pro- 
fessing to analyze these impulses in the strictest man- 
ner, declare that they are modes only of that omnipres- 
ent selflsm which prompts every man to secure for 
himself the greatest possible amount of the substan- 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 283 

tial good things of life. Inasmuch as the holder of 
power may easily accumulate wealth, and so v may 
largely command the services of other men, power, it 
is said, comes to be an object of desire, coveted alike 
by all. 

722. Thus to resolve ambition into the lowest spe- 
cies of self-love, and thus to materialize it, is infalli- 
bly to bring about a result nearly the same as that 
which attends the mistaken denunciations of the mor- 
alist above referred to. If ambition be only a dis- 
guised desire of sensuous enjoyments, then the strong 
and the wicked, and none else, will contend for scep- 
tres : the wise and the noble, if, indeed, they could be 
persuaded to yield their better convictions to such 
doctrines, would stand aloof from the strife. 

723. We should trace the love of power, or call it 
Ambition, to another source. In accordance with the 
guiding principle that is adhered to throughout this 
book, as we understand human nature in a more posi- 
tive sense, so we boldly give it a more generous in- 
terpretation. 

724. That which is of the very essence of Mind — 
that which is its primary rudiment, becomes the prom- 
inent distinction or individual characteristic of a few 
minds : sometimes in combination with the tranquil 
intellectual emotions (Section XII.), sometimes as re- 
lated to the pursuits of common life, where the most 
ordinary motives take effect, and sometimes in alliance 
with those social emotions which bring the individual 
man into a position of tacit contrariety with his fel- 
low-men, as above mentioned. 

725. Ambition accomplished, the desire of power 



284 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

achieved, command or influence over other men attain- 
ed, the disposal of great affairs fully enjoyed — all this 
done, and then a mind of rare energy becomes -a sam- 
ple mind, and is in that very condition which is the 
most characteristic of its nature. 

726. The accessories of power or its ostensible re- 
wards — its glitter and its pomps, its luxurious table, 
its soft indulgences — all these things are of the surface 
only, and those must have gone but a little way into 
the depths of human nature who tell us that it is for 
the sake of its bonbons and its trinkets that great 
minds tread the arduous ascents of ambition. In the 
large meaning of the Ego of those noted words, Ego 
et rex meus, there might have been embraced the car- 
dinal's feastings, and his retinue, and aught else of the 
sort which he relished and allowed ; but the substance 
which they represent was a quality of the soul that be- 
longed to the butcher's boy at Ipswich. 

727. It is thus that an effective achievement of the 
painful, the dangerous, the patience-trying work of the 
world is provided for and is made sure. But how 
much of this enormous task would actually be under- 
taken, or, if undertaken, would ever be completed, if 
men set themselves to it at the impulse of no motives 
of deeper origin or of greater intensity than are those 
which impel the day-laborer to acquit himself of his 
day's labor? Scarcely a thousandth part of it, and 
that fraction poorly done. 

728. As to the moralities of ambition or its immo- 
ralities, we have nothing to do with subjects of that 
class in this place. But there is nothing which the 
most severe teacher could allege in the way of repre- 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 285 

hension or of caution which could avail to dislodge 
from its place, in the economy of the social system, 
this principal element of the world of mind. 

729. For carrying forward the various purposes, and 
for securing all the interests of a community that is 
advanced in civilization, there is very much work to he 
done, for the doing of which no provision is made* un- 
less we include that set of motives, affecting a few 
minds, of which now we are speaking. 

730. The rough work of the world is sure to be 
done sufficiently well at the prompting of those mo- 
tives which impel every man to do the best he can for 
himself. These universal motives take effect alike 
upon the lad who sweeps a crossing and upon an un- 
der secretary of state. Another class of the common 
interests of a community will be cared for and made 
good by those who, while laboring, in fact, for their 
fellow-men, are thinking only of their individual tastes 
in doing so. It is thus that much of the intellectual 
work of a people is prosecuted in the fields of philos- 
ophy, poetry, and the fine arts. 

731. But beyond these labors, thus provided for, 
there is very much to be clone which will not be done 
unless we can engage in the service of the common- 
wealth a class of minds governed by motives that are 
neither ordinary nor calculating, in the vulgar sense 
of that term. There is need of men whose motives, 
consolidated into habits and dispositions, will carry 
them through services from which the selfish, and the 
sordid, and the prudent too, will draw back. We need 
the services of men whose biographies are hereafter to 
come into the hands of the historian. 



286 THE WOKLD OP MIND. 

732. But men such as these will never be forth- 
coming, if, on the one hand, ambition, and the thirst 
of fame, and the love of power, be denounced as. essen- 
tially vicious, or if, on the other hand, these emotions 
and passions are so spoken of in the literature of a 
people as to vilify and vulgarize them, and to put a 
degrading interpretation upon any course of action 
which springs from them. 

733. Public services are performed efficiently by 
none but those who have wittingly pledged life and 
fortune from the very first. These achievements and 
labors are always of a kind that imperil life and health, 
and that invade or quite preclude domestic felicity ; 
they are to be carried forward under extreme discour- 
agements ; often in the face of rancorous and unscru- 
pulous opposition ; and they may bring upon a man 
calumnies which it is never permitted him to refute. 
At the end of his course, perhaps, he stands " begging 
a little earth to cover him," uncertain whether the men 
of the next age shall care to hear his cause anew, and 
shall reverse the unrighteous sentence of his contem- 
poraries. 

734. Yet, unless services of this order are freely 
undertaken, and are well and nobly achieved, the world 
must come to a stand ; or, if not, public functions of 
every kind must be abandoned to those whose base- 
ness will utterly vitiate the social mass throughout all 
ranks. 

735. What we now affirm is just this — that in the 
structure and the functions of the social system there 
is needed, and there is actually found, an impulse, tak- 
ing effect upon a few minds, which will carry the man 



ANTAGONIST EMOTIONS OF THE SOCIAL SYSTEM. 287 

forward far in advance of every other motive, and far 
in advance of a prudent regard to his individual wel- 
fare. This we allege to be the very characteristic of 
genuine ambition and of the true desire of power. 
Spurious ambition and the vulgar lust of power, if 
ever they seem to be self-sacrificing, are so only at the 
instigation of conventional feelings, the fear of dis- 
grace, or a blind compliance with the rules and usages 
of professional behavior. 

736. But has not this element of human nature a 
further significance? Does it not point forward to 
another state of things ? He who throws himself into 
public services not merely at the risk, but at the cost 
of all the things of earth, does he not proclaim a truth 
which speaks of those things that are not of earth ? 
To attempt an answer of these suggestive questions 
would carry us quite beyond the range of our present 
task. 

737. We return, then, to the things of earth, and in 
doing so should note this property of a genuine and 
self-immolating ambition : that as it is open to a some- 
thing beyond — to a something in the remote future 
which is undefined, and as it has a consciousness to- 
ward the infinite, it readily coalesces with every species 
of advancement and improvement, in moral principles 
and in feeling, which is going on around it. To this 
genuine and non-selfish ambition there belongs a nat- 
ural buoyancy ; it has an upward and a forward look ; 
it asks to be numbered with the imponderable elements 
of the mundane system. Where, on any side, there is 
the most vitality, where there is progress, where there 
is any commendable enterprise in hand, where there is 



288 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

that which is true, that which is honest, that which is 
just, that which is pure, that which is lovely, that 
which is of good report — wherever, among the things 
of earth, there may he found any virtue and any praise, 
thitherward will a genuine ambition and an instinctive 
love of power move on, and along with such things 
will it push forward ; and it will do so in front of all 
perils, and at any cost, and with a seraph-like determ- 
ination to reach the goal. 



XX. 

EMOTIONS AND TASTES RELATED TO THE MODULA- 
TIONS OP SOUND. 

738. Upon the field of Mental Philosophy the same 
mystery confronts us anew almost at every turn, seem- 
ing as if it were about to reveal itself, and yet again 
mocking our endeavors to resolve it. The interaction 
of Mind and Matter within the animal organization 
sometimes nears the surface, and yet it is there as in- 
scrutable as when deeply seated. 

739. An instance of this sort presents itself when 
we inquire concerning the power of modulated sounds, 
whether as melody or harmony, to affect the mind. 
This power extends not merely to the production of 
pleasurable organic sensations, but, far more than this, 
to move the very soul, and to awaken every sentiment 
and to stir every passion of which it is susceptible. 
This power conforms itself to conditions which distin- 
guish it, in the most decisive manner, from every other 
kind of influence affectina; the senses. Musical sounds 



POWERS OF MUSIC. 289 

so take hold of the mind as nothing else takes hold 
of it. 

740. On this ground we are invited to step forward, 
step by step, from that which is mechanical and mathe- 
matical, to that which, in the loftiest sense, is emo- 
tional ; nevertheless, the precise point at which we 
pass the border from the world of Matter to the world 
of Mind escapes our keenest search. 

741. Those articulate modulations of the human 
voice which are made available for the purposes of 
speech are not in themselves pleasurable ; they are not 
organically pleasurable, although they may become so 
by aid of the associated ideas and feelings which they 
awaken. If we include all the tones that are employed 
in conveying our meaning by emphasis as well as 
words, the variations of which the voice is capable 
are innumerable ; but unless they are subjected to the 
rules of rhythm and cadence, and so become musical, 
they do nothing more than convey the mind of the 
speaker to the mind of the hearer. 

742. Whether a single note, either of the human 
voice or of a musical instrument, prolonged, is organic- 
ally pleasurable, is a question which we need not here 
discuss, but may assume the affirmative. It is certain 
(and this is all that concerns us just now) that success- 
ive sounds and simultaneous sounds, having an exact 
mathematical relation to each other in tone, are pleas- 
ure-giving in a high degree. Endlessly varied com- 
binations of these related sounds come within the 
compass of musical composition, but the element is 
the same in all ; two or more sounds bear to each other 
a definite relation which is measurable mechanically, 

N 



290 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

and which, in the most absolute sense, is computable 
mathematically. 

743. That which, in each instant of time, falls upon 
the tympanum when we listen to music, is a combina- 
tion of vibrations ; and of the precise relation of the 
constituents of this commingled sound the human ear 
is cognizant with infallible exactness. 

744. The laws of acoustics are subject to rigid 
mathematical treatment, and the laws of musical rela- 
tion are also mathematically known ; but these laws 
carry us no farther in explication of the power of music 
over the feelings and passions than to the surface of 
the tympanum ; all beyond, or farther in than this, is 
a terra incognita, until we come into the Mind itself, 
and confer with it in its own soul-fraught manner. 
From the exterior coating of the tympanum the next 
step brings us to a soft mass of non-vibratory nervous 
substance, attenuated in its microscopic filaments. 
Here, then, we must take leave of what is measur- 
able and mechanical, for we have set foot upon the 
threshold of animal organization. We have passed 
from the department of one science, the laws of sound, 
to the department of another science, the laws of ani- 
mal organization ; and yet this latter science has scarce- 
ly offered us its aid, when it declares its inability to 
give us any further guidance. We have already gone 
over from the region of a nervous expansion, and have 
reached the adytum of the Percipient Mind, and this 
mind is now, perhaps, in a state of consciousness so 
intense as to be quite vanquished by its emotions. 

745. The Mind percipient of sound is, with exqui- 
site exactness, cognizant not only of all differences of 



POWEKS OF MUSIC. 291 

sound, but of the measurable relations of sound ; and 
in respect of these it is intensely sensitive, both pleas- 
urably and painfully, toward them, as trite or not 
true, mathematically ; and then, beyond this, it is alive 
throughout the wide circuit of its emotional nature up 
from the gentlest sentiments or sympathies to the 
stormiest passions — to the suggestive meaning of mel- 
ody and of harmony. All that is tender in feeling, 
and all that is tumultuous in passion, all that attempers 
human nature by soothing excitements, and all that 
maddens it, is at the command of Music. 

746. Thus it is, then, that, within the compass of 
a paragraph, we name, so far as it is known to us, all 
that fills the space between the outer world of mathe- 
matical relations and the inner world of refined feel- 
ing, and of pure sentiment and of impetuous emotion ; 
but in doing so we fail in our endeavor to lay the hand 
upon some midway links of the chain. Our part, then, 
is to accept this, our inability to reveal the unknown, 
and to follow such tracks of thought as are open to us. 
Now it appears that, on this ground, such things as 
the following are open to us : 

747. It is in the sense of Hearing first, and next in 
order, as we shall have occasion to show, in the sense 
of Sight, that the union of Mind with the Animal or- 
ganization, or the Corporeal condition of Mind, yields 
an advantage on the side of Mind as opposed to animal 
tendencies. This is a fact which deserves attention. 

748. Not merely for enjoyment sake, but for secur- 
ing the animal conservation, the senses of Smell, Taste, 
and Touch are the medium, severally, of a pleasurable 
consciousness. But in each instance, as to these senses, 



292 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

the enjoyment is of a kind which lowers rather than 
raises the moral being ; it is such as needs to be ad- 
mitted with caution, and should presently be dismissed : 
just so far as it rules the man, it degrades him. 

749. The pleasurable sensations of hearing and of 
sight, although they take their rise, like the others, in 
the animal organization, move forward in a contrary 
direction ; the tendency of these organic pleasures is 
from the body to the soul; the " arrow-head" which 
indicates the course of the movement is pointed up- 
ward, not downward. It may be true that the gratifi- 
cations of these two senses are sometimes, or are often, 
abused ; but, in the order of nature, they lead onward 
from matter to Mind, they point from symbols to the 
things symbolized ; they move forward from the less 
worthy to the more worthy ; from that which debases 
to that which elevates, and purifies, and ennobles hu- 
man nature. 

750. We take up first of these two the pleasurable 
sensations which enter by the auditory nerve, assumed 
to be, as we have just now said, pleasurable organical- 
ly, and not becoming so by aid of indirect associa- 
tions ; and it is such sounds only as are musical that 
are organically pleasing. Musical sounds, whether they 
proceed from a wire or cord in tension, or from an elas- 
tic metallic plate, or a bell, or from the human voice, 
or the throat of birds, observe this law : that the vibra- 
tions transmitted, in whatever way, from their source to 
the ear, are definite as to the number that take place in 
a given time — say a second ; and that the exact num- 
ber of vibrations that constitute a note has a determi- 
nate and invariable relationship of agreement with that 



POWEES OF MUSIC. 293 

determinate number of vibrations which constitute any 
other note. A chord is this agreement ; a discord is 
a variation from it. A simple mechanical apparatus 
gives us the actual number of vibrations that are prop- 
er to each note, and shows the mathematical relation 
of note to note, and to half notes. 

751. As to the truth of this relationship, and our 
sense of it, and the contrary, in any instance when mu- 
sical sounds fall on the ear, the same, nearly, may be 
said of it as we say of those proprieties of behavior 
which distinguish well-bred persons — conformity there- 
to gives us little pleasure ; but any instance of non- 
conformity in those around us is positively, and in a 
high degree, painful. The mere sense of truth in mu- 
sical sounds may indeed be agreeable, and especially it 
is so if it be thought of in comparison with discords / 
but we must look further for the cause of that organic 
enjoyment, intense as it is, upon which, as a substra- 
tum, the pleasurable quality of music sustains itself. 

752. It is not the nerve behind the tympanum — it 
is the Mind that is conscious of sound ; it is not the 
retina, but the Mind that is conscious of light. So 
much as this must be taken for certain as our datum 
in any kind of reasoning concerning the correspondence 
of Mind and matter within the animal organization. 
This is not demonstrably true, because nothing in this 
department of science can be demonstrated. The best 
we can do is, with two or more suppositions in view, 
to choose the one which consists the best with the 
mass of facts that should find in it an explication. 

753. Mind, conscious as it is of sounds, and con- 
scious of the rate of vibration in sounds, and of all cor- 



294 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

respondences and disagreements in these rates, proves 
itself to possess a perfect mathematical sense both as 
to time and number. This perception of time and 
number gives this peculiar evidence of its constancy 
and of its universality, namely, that whereas, in the 
other senses — taste, smell, touch, and even sight — the 
perceptions and judgments of individual persons differ 
in extreme degrees, there is an almost absolute agree- 
ment among all who possess the musical sense as to 
the truth or falseness of musical relations of sound. A 
chord is instantly assented to as such by any number 
of persons who are musical by constitution and train- 
ing. The instances of dissent from such judgments 
are exceedingly rare, if they occur at all. There are 
many who fail in the attempt to pitch their own voice 
correctly, and there are also very many whose percep- 
tions of sound are obtuse or confused ; but among 
those whose ears are musically sensitive there is una- 
nimity of judgment as to chords and discords. 

754:. What, then, is the warrantable inference on 
this ground ? It seems to be this : that Mind, or let 
us say Mind in its corporeal lodgment, is subjected to 
rhythmical conditions, or to the laws of Number and 
Time. But this conformity can be none, unless it be 
absolute and infinitesimal. Man and the singing-bird 
alike confess their relationship to the same laws of 
musical accordance. 

755. A single musical note we assume to be organ- 
ically pleasure-giving ; but the complication of these 
organic sensations, like every kind of complication, im- 
parts intensity to them, and the sense of pleasure is 
rapidly enhanced at every change in the movement. 



POWERS OF MUSIC. 295 

756. Yet another step is needed to give consistency 
to our hypothesis ; or let us call it a mere conjecture, 
and it is this : that, as to the emotions — the gentle 
sensibilities and the passions — each has its specific 
rhythmical law, and each its key-note. It is, as we 
may imagine, at the point where the mysterious inter- 
action of Mind and body takes place that this rhythm 
has its sphere of influence : it is a latent law, making 
itself known only in its results. 

757. That, therefore, which we imagine to take place 
when Music kindles an emotion, or arouses the pas- 
sions, is this — that a coincidence of the one rhythm 
with the other has occurred. A momentary stimulus 
thus given to any class of feelings will be enough ; 
that luxurious sense of enjoyment with which it is the 
prerogative of music to fill the soul goes over to en- 
hance the feeling which the first few sounds have ex- 
cited, and thenceforward the intensity of that feeling is 
directly as the pleasure. 

758. "We turn from conjectures, probable or not, and 
look to unquestionable facts. It is not difficult to con- 
ceive of a scheme of existence which should in every 
respect be the same as that of this actual world, only 
not inclusive of any musical consciousness ; vibrating 
bodies giving forth no sweet sounds, the human voice 
capable of none but non-musical articulations, and, in 
the human soul, no corresponding musical faculty or 
feeling. 

759. It does not appear that the world, such as it 
is, might not go on well enough under such a priva- 
tion. So far as we can see, Music is, as to the animal 
organization, and as to the social system, and as to 



296 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

any palpable utility, a superfluity. Music, we must 
grant it, has been thrown in upon the human system ; 
it is a free grace, and a boon not demandable on any 
grounds ol necessity ; it might have been withheld. 
If it had been withheld, we should have been conscious 
of no destitution. "As to this music, of which you 
say that it is the choicest luxury of an. upper sphere, 
and the ineffable delight of immortals, we want it not 
on earth ; nay, such as you describe it to us, it would 
ill suit us ; it would put us out of humor with our 
hard lot : keep it, therefore, to yourselves." 

760. So we might have thought and so spoken. 
And, in fact, have we not often felt, while the powers 
of harmony were ruling all souls in its own sovereign 
manner, that this power is of foreign origin — that it 
has come down among us — that it sojourns only— that 
after it has displayed itself for an hour, it will wing 
itself away to a more gladsome world ? 

761. We may coldly condemn any such mode of 
feeling as unwarrantable, or fanciful, or extravagant, 
and yet it returns upon us, whether we invite or re- 
ject it. Music is a power far more than earth could 
pretend to ; it is a large, free gift, and it has a remote 
meaning, and it asks the ear of man as a sample of a 
state of being with the conditions of which it shall al- 
ways and altogether consist. 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD. 297 



XXI. 

EMOTIONS AND TASTES RELATED TO THE OBJECTS OF 
SIGHT. 

762. It is, as we have just now said (747), in the 
sense of Hearing first., and in the sense of Sight next, 
and it is in these two, and scarcely at all in the other 
three (or four), that we find the pleasurable conscious- 
ness which attends a certain class of their perceptions 
to have an upward tendency ; that is to say, to exert 
an influence which is intellectual and moral more than 
sensual or merely animal. 

763. We recapitulate thus far. The power of the 
human voice to utter articulate sounds is a function 
that is needed in the mechanism of the human system. 
Destitute of this power, the machinery of the intellect- 
ual and social world could not go on — could not de- 
velop itself. But the power of these same organs to 
give forth musical sounds, and the discriminate con- 
sciousness of such sounds in the ear, are quite supple- 
mentary to this machinery, for its functions and pur- 
poses might he fulfilled, music apart, and on the sup- 
position that the consciousness of it had not been be- 
stowed. In this sense, then, it is a superfluity and a 
grace. 

764. In analogy with this are those conditions of 
the material world as to its exterior, and those corre- 
sponding Tastes and Emotions of the human mind with 

N2 



298 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

which we have now to do. These conditions are sup- 
plementary in relation to the structure and functions 
of organized bodies, and also of the unorganized masses 
of the world ; and, in like manner, the tastes and feel- 
ings to which these conditions are related are supple- 
mentary to the Mind. Human nature might have 
wanted them without Tbeing conscious Of any want. 

765. The same analogy holds good, also, in the 
next step. Those pleasurable tastes and emotions 
which take their rise from the exterior and visible 
conditions of the material world have an upward tend- 
ency toward that which is intellectual, not sensual, 
and toward that which is moral, not degrading. 

766. Thus it is that, on one hand, the sense of 
Melody and Harmony, and, on the other hand, the 
sense of Beauty, take their position in the scheme of 
human existence as intermediate between sense and 
sentiment — between the organization and the soul — 
between that which is the lowest among the functions 
of life and that which is the loftiest. These two spe- 
cies of consciousness may well be regarded as redeem- 
ing energies in the human system. 

767. We may look abroad upon the material world, 
animate and inanimate, with two entirely dissimilar 
intentions ; for we may look at every thing as Struc- 
ture and Function, or we may look at the same ob- 
jects as a blended manifestation of Form and of Color. 
Under the first of these aspects it is the interior chief- 
ly that we are concerned with ; in the second it is the 
exterior exclusively. As to the first, it is Eeason 
that is called into exercise ; as to the second, it is a 
Sense for which we want a comprehensive and alto- 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WOELD. 299 

gether fit term : we call it the sense of Beauty, or the 
sense of the beautiful and the sublime. 

768. Among all the sounds that fall upon the ear, 
it is, as we have said, one class only that is organical- 
ly pleasurable, namely, musical sounds ; but among 
the infinitely various impressions that fall upon the 
visual organ there are impressions of several distinct 
classes that are in themselves pleasurable. This at 
least must be affirmed, that these impressions differ so 
widely in kind that it is better to consider them apart 
than as modes only of one species. 

769. Yet it is true that, in the intensely pleasurable 
consciousness of Beauty as it is spread upon the sur- 
face of the material world, there is ordinarily little 
thought of its several constituents. In this luxury of 
the sense and of the soul there is an emotion, the 
tendency of which is to blend and to commingle rath- 
er than to distinguish and to separate the elements of 
enjoyment. It is when the Beauty of the visible 
world comes to be regarded as an object of Art, and 
when it is to be reproduced or imitated, that we are 
led — necessarily so — to make distinctions, and to give 
separate and careful attention to each ingredient in the 
composite enjoyment. Some such analytic process is 
needed also when, as now, we intend to consider the 
subject before us in relation to its elements in a sci- 
entific sense. But for a moment we may look at it 
apart from analysis, and without any discriminative 
carefulness. 

770. The Beauty of the visible world and its sub- 
limity — for we must not now divide elements that are 
more often commingled than disjoined — this Beauty is 



300 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

such that, if a man "be exempt from the pressure of 
common wants, and if he he free to surrender himself 
to the life of intelligence, and also if he be of that tem- 
perament which relates him to such objects, then, and 
with these conditions supposed, the decorated aspect 
of the world quite fills the faculties which it stimu- 
lates : it is enough of enjoyment ; more, than this is 
not thought of or cared for. No other occupation 
than that of contemplating it is desired ; no sense ot 
satiety or weariness is engendered in this continuous 
contemplation. 

771. It need scarcely be said that, in thus speaking, 
we put out of view, for the moment, that from which 
no human being may, in fact, insulate himself, name- 
ly, the requirements of his moral and spiritual nature. 
No man is free to hold himself clear of social and re- 
ligious obligations. These duly allowed for and sup- 
posed, then it may be affirmed that the visible world 
and the human soul, with its circle of Emotions and 
of Tastes, are complements the one of the other. 
Throughout a large extent of its circle of faculties, 
the human soul has no vitality : it is not, or it is la- 
tent, until it receives its spring from its apprehension 
of the beauty which surrounds it in the visible world. 

772. Thus it is, then, that, if the Reason be para- 
mount in the individual temperament (419, et seq.), 
then the man finds his sphere in making himself con- 
versant with the structure and functions of the mate- 
rial system ; the world, when thus regarded, is the 
complement of the Human Reason. But if it be the 
Emotional nature and the Tastes that are paramount, 
then it is the JExterior of this same world that en- 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD. 301 

gages the faculties and that supplies them with their 
aliment. 

773. We have to seek for the rudiments of that 
composite pleasure which we derive from the specta- 
cle of the world, regarded in its visible properties. 

774. I suppose myself to be in an apartment or 
hall illuminated by a diffused light. Before me there 
is a slab of white marble. Unless the sight be weak 
and diseased, it is always true that "it is a pleasant 
thing for the eye to behold the light ;." yet this is a 
pleasure of an undefined sort. But now upon the 
marble slab let there be thrown, by a prism, or by a 
sunbeam passing through colored glass, one of the 
three constituents of the solar light — the Yellow, or 
the Red, or the Blue. Let this two-inch square of 
color have an unsullied prismatic purity, and all the 
brilliance that can be given it, so as not to oppress the 
sight. This colored surface not merely attracts the 
eye, as might happen from the appearance of a dingy 
spot or stain upon the marble, nor as might happen 
from the falling of a beam of direct light on the same 
area. I gaze at this pure resplendent yellow, or red, 
or blue with a vivid pleasure. Unless there be an 
excess of radiation from the colored surface, the eye 
feeds upon the brilliant color — feasts upon it. We 
say the eye ; but rather let us say the Mind, alive to- 
ward color, not merely notes it as distinguishable from 
tohiteness, but imbibes it with a satisfaction, as if it 
were the aliment of an appetite. This yellow, or red, 
or blue — pure, spotless, and resplendent — if it were 
then seen for the first time, would kindle a faculty ; it 
would impart a new element of enjoyment to conscious- 
ness. 



302 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

775. But now upon this same slab there is next 
thrown the three primary colors, each mingling with 
its neighbor, as seen in the prismatic spectrum. A 
new gratification, in this case, presents itself ; for it is 
not merely three organic satisfactions for one, but these 
patches of color — the primaries, and their mixtures — 
the orange, the violet, the purple, the green — have a 
fixed relation each to the others, which the organ rec- 
ognizes as true and as grateful, because it is a fixed 
relation. Take each of the secondary colors apart, 
and it exerts its own power over the sensuous faculty ; 
but taking these secondary colors in groups with cer- 
tain contrasts obtained by aid of the primary colors, 
and then new gratifications of an organic kind are the 
result. 

776. Close by the side of the prismatic spectrum, 
within which the colors are so commingled as to pre- 
serve the purity of each, and a certain relationship 
among them, place a sheet of paper upon which stains, 
or any non-related mixtures of the same elements are 
spread out. Then appeal to any healthy eye to make 
its choice between the one surface and the other. 
Which of the two is it that the sight rests upon with 
satisfaction? Or let the adjudicator be an infant 
whose perceptions are unsophisticated. On this 
ground an analogy presents itself between sounds and 
colors which should be adverted to in passing, al- 
though we should not too far insist upon it: it is a 
suggestive analogy, not a scientific generalization. 

777. Among the infinite diversities of sounds, it is 
vibratory or musical sounds only that are organically 
pleasurable, and these, if they be synchronous or close- 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WOULD. 303 

ly consecutive, must be inter-related in a certain per- 
fectly exact manner, sound to sound, otherwise they 
give pain, not pleasure. Now as to colors, it is not 
the promiscuous or the accidental commingling of 
them, such as is presented on the dull surfaces of 
modern buildings, roadways, or overcast skies, that 
awakens and engages the visual sense ; the elements 
of light must be presented in their purity, and they 
must be inter-related in a specific manner. Pure col- 
ors, commingled in certain proportions, and placed in a 
certain juxtaposition, are gazed upon with a vivid or- 
ganic gratification. Musical (vibratory) sounds in their 
purity, and if related to each other in fixed proportions, 
are listened to with intense organic pleasure. In these 
facts there is, to say the least, the indication of an in- 
ner truth, resolvable probably into the mathematical 
conditions of Mind. But the pursuit of so recondite a 
subject would not consist with our present purpose. 

778. The pure elementary colors, and also the sec- 
ondary commixtures of them, are presented in many 
of the surfaces of the material system, organized and 
unorganized, and the eye (the eye that is gifted for 
color) recognizes them with pleasure ; as, for example, 
in the cloudless vault of heaven, in the splendors of 
sunrise and sunset, in the precious stones — the ame- 
thyst, the emerald, the ruby, the sapphire, the topaz ; 
in the vestiture of some animals, especially of birds 
and insects, and in shells ; and not least, in the deli- 
cious gayeties of the flower-garden. 

779. But besides these primary and these secondary 
colors, a large proportion of the surfaces that meet the 
eye in nature, and upon which the artistic eye rests 



304 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

with a keen delight, are those comminglings of the 
secondary colors, forming the tertiary, which are tech- 
nically called tints. These tints, when they nearly 
approach each other, and when they are set off or re- 
lieved by brilliant spots of the primary colors, fully 
satisfy, but never satiate an eye that is alive to them. 
The instances are such as these : the remote distances 
of a mountainous country ; hill sides, changefully illu- 
minated and cloud-shaded ; the surfaces of rocks, time- 
worn, and partially coated with lichens — gray, green- 
ish, slaty ; the exterior walls of ancient buildings ; the 
massive southern frontage of woods or plantations, in 
which all varieties of foliage court the sun ; and these 
at the time — so brief — when the earliest autumnal de- 
cay has shown itself. As to the decorated animal 
species — birds, butterflies, moths, Crustacea — it is sel- 
dom in these instances the tints or tertiary colors, but 
more often the primary and the secondary, that Nature 
has brought upon her palette. 

780. Those groupings of deep and rich colors of 
which Art makes her boast, and which spread a splen- 
dor upon historic subjects, these are seldom — scarcely 
ever presented on the tablet of Nature. They are the 
devices and the resources of Art ; and yet, although 
they are devices, it is not the less true that they draw 
their reason from principles, and they please us in Art 
only because, by its structure, the mind, as to its vis- 
ual faculty, is alive to these harmonies and these con- 
trasts, and recognizes them as true. Music is Art, not 
Nature ; but it is Art conformed with the most severe 
exactitude to the laws of mind in regard to its con- 
sciousness toward sound. 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD. 305 

781. Art and its principles are not our subject. If 
now we return to the aspects of Nature so far as relates 
to the harmonies of color, then we have to give its due 
place to that main condition of beauty in landscape, 
atmospheric intervention, or its semi-opacity and its 
diffusive power — in a word, all that is comprehended 
in the technical phrase aerial perspective. If we would 
know how much of our English feeling of the charms 
of landscape we owe to this - intervention, we should 
take our summer's tour in countries such as Palestine, 
where it is at its minimum, and where hills of com- 
monplace outline, far and near, look like the painted 
plaster of Paris model of a country, all equally distinct, 
and all hard in outline. 

782. It is the semi-transparency of the atmosphere, 
carrying its variable burden of uncombined moisture, 
its mists and its meteorologic accidents, that suggests 
to Art something beyond the mere imitation of colors 
and of forms, and that imparts to landscape its com- 
munity of feeling with poetry. By the breaking down 
of secondary colors into tints, by the blending, almost 
into one, of colors that are nearly related, and not least, 
by giving to the harmonies of color an advantage over 
the too great obtrusiveness of form — it is in these 
modes that the encumbered atmosphere of these lati- 
tudes gives to landscape much of its ideality and of 
its poetic value as allied to pictorial art, and to po- 
etry also. 

783. It may be thought that, while we are naming 
the elements of that enjoyment which the eye receives 
from the aspects of the material world, we should give 
a prominent place to light and shadow, or effect, as it 



306 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

is called. Light and shadow are ministrative to the 
visual development of form. Rudimentally consider- 
ed, they are not pleasure-giving. Among the devices 
of Art employed for the production of factitious visual 
impressions derived from the flat colored surfaces, light 
and shadow, and the more and the less of direct illu- 
mination, are principal means of accomplishing its pur- 
poses ; but if we carry ourselves, in imagination, to a 
world of light, a world of colors, every substance being 
phosphorescent, or as if luminous from within, then, 
and in such a region of commingled harmonies and 
splendors, we should ask for no heightening of the 
charms of the landscape by aid of shadow. Shadow 
is a means of Art, and in the world of nature it takes 
its place among those arrangements of the material 
system that are adapted to meet the functions, and 
purposes, and movements of animal life. 

784. Light and shade, or rather shadow, in its vari- 
ous degrees and with its reflected lights, along with 
color, give us our notion of Form, and Form comes to 
be thought of either as bounded in relation to other 
and more remote surfaces by its exterior contour — its 
outline, or otherwise as a rotund mass. It is in the 
first-named of these two modes that we learn to regard 
large and stationary objects, such as mountain heights 
and public edifices, which are seen from certain fixed 
points of view, whence their outline has an invariable 
aspect. It is in the second mode that we come to 
think of smaller objects, and those in relation to which 
we and they are incessantly varying position, so that 
it is not one contour, or two, or three oontours that 
become familiar to the eye, but every possible exterior 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD. 307 

line. It is thus, especially, that we receive our notion 
of the human form, which is the pre-eminent compen- 
dium of all principles of beauty, and which unites all 
charms, is formed, and that it acquires consistency. 
It is because Sculpture meets this condition that its 
pleasure-giving power surpasses so much that of 
Painting. 

785. The organic reason of the pleasure-giving 
quality of certain lines and forms, while other lines 
and forms are either beheld with indifference or are 
disagreeable, has been the subject of much controversy 
to little purpose ; but it is a question upon which we 
need not here enter : it belongs to the theory of Art. 
What we have to do with is the matter of fact, and 
concerning this fact there can be no room for doubt, or 
none among those upon whom Nature has bestowed 
the sense of form. This is an instance ranging along 
with several to which we have already had occasion to 
advert ; it is a case of a special faculty ; it is an en- 
dowment of individual minds, and is denied to other 
minds. Thus it is as to the musical consciousness 
both as to the ear and as to the soul. And so the 
sense of color, and so the sense of form, which are the 
endowments of individuals. Nothing could be more 
futile than the endeavor to talk any such faculty into 
those who have not been so fortunate as to bring it 
with them into the world. But then we are not to 
deny or to call in question the reality of a gift because 
we ourselves, or others, may want it. There are more 
than a few persons who have no power whatever to 
apprehend an abstraction of any kind ; nevertheless, 
we hold mathematical science to be real and sure. 



308 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

786. In proof of the fact of the pleasure-giving 
quality of certain lines and forms, and of the want of 
that quality in other lines and forms, innumerable 
familiar instances might be adduced. The track of a 
slow-moving animal, as of a snail, upon a pane of glass 
or across a floor, has no character, no uniform inten- 
tion, and is not pleasing ; the track of the electric 
spark across the heavens, although it be associated 
with ideas of harm and danger, is seen and admired 
in itself; the angles of which it is composed, and its 
general direction, have an aspect ot oneness along with 
variety, indicative of force, liberty, and singleness of 
principle. If the electric spark, especially when it is 
double or treble, as it spans the heavens from east to 
west, were as enduring as is the rainbow, it would be 
gazed at as the most magnificent of natural spectacles, 
and as greatly surpassing in beauty the rainbow, al- 
though graced with its prismatic gayety. The outline 
of common rounded hills against the sky is not pleas- 
ing ; but mountain ridges, when they are the product 
of great dynamic changes, are often highly pleasing. 
Masses of foliage may in themselves be quite unmean- 
ing, but if the shadows of these same masses are thrown 
by an oblique sun upon a wall, the uniform perspective 
gives them character and meaning, and the eye is at- 
tracted toward them. 

787. The contour of fruit-trees — the apple, for in- 
stance — does not recommend itself to the eye. That 
of most forest trees does so. In leaf or in bare 
branches, the difference holds — to wit, in comparing 
the wintry orchard with the wintry woodland. The 
beech, the Spanish chestnut, the ash, the elm, the oak, 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WORLD. 309 

whether superbly clad as in June, or naked as in 
January, are objects upon which the gifted eye rests 
with untiring enjoyment. Those artistic practices 
which represent form only, and its contours or outline 
chiefly, as in pencil and crayon sketches, are evidence 
of the highly grateful quality of this element when 
taken apart from color. Landscape sketching, land- 
scape tinted drawing, and landscape painting, in which 
last color and atmospheric effect are combined, may be 
regarded as demonstration in detail of the several ele- 
ments of that never-spent luxury which the eye draws 
from the aspects of the material world. Nature, using 
the term now in its technical, artistic sense, is as truly 
now, as at first, man's paradise; it is the scene in which, 
if it be his lot to linger, advantaged by instructed tastes, 
he never grows weary, he is never satiated. 

788. The copious and higher theme of beauty in the 
human form is at once too copious, and it is of too 
theoretic a kind to be entered upon in these pages. 
As to the entire subject, therefore, we do not forget it, 
but we assign it to a fitter place. Having said this 
one word, we return to the beauty, and the splendor, 
and the sublimity of the visible world — to Nature, as 
it is called. 

789. The worn subject-matter of this theme, de- 
scriptively treated, must not occupy any portion of our 
space. What concerns us is this, that, as in regard 
to musical sounds, so in regard to color and form, the 
mind, taking its start or gaining its suggestion from 
the level of its organic perceptions, which in these in- 
stances are pleasurable, commingles these perceptions 
with its emotions and with its feelings of every species 



310 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

and order. We say commingles the one kind of con- 
sciousness with the other kinds ; but in fact, and as if 
it were with a galvanic instantaneousness and an in- 
tensity of action, these perceptions of visible beauty 
collapse upon whatever sentiment, feeling, affection, 
or passion is nearest at hand, and thus the external 
world as beautiful, and the percipient faculty — the ani- 
mal organization, and the soul, with its circle of sensi- 
bilities, even the entireness of its emotional nature, 
comes to be so blended as that thenceforward the ani- 
mal ceases to be animal, and the soul admits, without 
exception, an aid from its lower nature in following 
the impulses of its higher nature. 

790. The beauty of Nature, as Landscape, regarded 
as the subject or material of the imitative arts, does, 
indeed, connect itself with sentiments of a delicious 
kind, but they are not such as are of the most elevated 
order. Painting, on this ground, is able to administer 
much exquisite enjoyment, but still it walks on earth ; 
it may not boast that it has wings. The beauty of 
nature, regarded in itself and apart from Art, it is this 
that leads the way into the region of poetry, and in 
this region the human mind does not ask wings : it 
has them, and it soars. 

791. So instinctive is the affinity of the emotions 
and affections with the beauty of the visible world, 
that a combination between them takes place even 
when this beauty presents itself under conditions of 
extreme disadvantage. Take an instance — railways, 
careering as they do over the chimney-pots of great 
towns, give us an insight into the attic life of such 
places, and we see what are its discomforts, and what 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WOELD. 311 

may be its embellishments too. On the window-sill 
of a topmost paper-patched casement there are flower- 
pots — two or three, with bright geraniums ; there is 
also a choice balsam, just now in magnificent bloom ! 
But look at the Spitalfields proprietor of these floral 
treasures ! To tend them is his first care in the foggy 
morning. Squalid, indeed, in aspect is this amateur ; 
and as to his breakfast, which must be shared with a 
craving family, it falls far short of sufficiency for seven. 
Nevertheless, half starved as he is — worn with eight- 
een or twenty hours' labor, and his haggard, heart-sick 
Eve by his side, and his ill-conditioned progeny about 
him, with annoyances accumulated, and almost all 
things convenient absent, yet this man is man, and 
therefore beautiful natuee and he shall not be sun- 
dered. Man will cling to a memento of his paradise ; 
nor shall any ordinary sufferings wean him from the 
thought of this, his primeval felicity ; and so it is that 
if this grudging world, with its boundless superfluities, 
can spare him nothing more, he will yet make himself 
as happy as a lord with a single flower-pot and a bal- 
sam in bloom. 

792. Yet this Spitalfields florist is, perhaps, only a 
"flower fancier," and it may be that there is no poe- 
try in him. But there may be poetry in him, for there 
is in many of his class ; and then this single plant, its 
semi-transparent stem, its leaf, so delicate in structure, 
and so pure in color and surface, and its exquisite 
blossom ! but who shall do justice to the painting of 
its petals, scarlet and white, or to the elegance of those 
petals in form ? This plant, if the soul of poetry be 
in its owner — this flower, as often as he looks at it, 



312 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

whispers to him of all those things, sweet, bright, rich, 
magnificent, which make gay and glad the wide sunny 
world, outlying far "beyond and around the pandemo- 
nium of want and woe at the heart of which his stern 
destiny chains him. 

793. The same railway which has brought us over 
Spitalfields shall carry us, not to Chatsworth, nor to 
any place where wealth and taste lord it over nature, 
but it shall be to some spot, the like to which there 
are thousands scattered over this land of hedgerows 
and cottage homes — places where nature owes the least 
to art, and where she herself, and not her rival Art, is 
thought of by those who have learned how to love her. 
Deep in the recesses of an untouched rural district, 
where the summer's noon is as silent as a midway ex- 
panse of the Atlantic, where there are corn-fields, and 
meadows, and copses, and uplands — not mountains and 
rivulets — not rivers — and where there is a cottage and 
a garden, not a mansion and grounds — there, or in any 
such place, may the days and years of a long life be 
passed in converse with beautiful nature, and this rel- 
ish shall in no wise be more languid at seventy than 
it was at seventeen. 

794. The simple beauty of nature draws toward 
itself a higher power — that of the infinite — in several 
different modes ; and when it does so, it affects us in 
another manner, and we call it the sublime. It is true 
that, apart from any element of beauty, objects may 
affect us so as that we think them sublime. Mere 
vastness or bulk does so, and especially if it rear itself 
aloft, and give the notion of danger, and inspire terror. 
If one were on the ridge of an ordinary slate-covered 



BEAUTY OF THE VISIBLE WOKLD. 313 

roof, lie might imagine the dull surface to he extended, 
right and left, for a mile without a break ; and, more- 
over, suppose it to stretch down from the ridge to 
which he clings a mile in depth ! there is then before 
him an idea fraught with terror, and he may say it is 
sublime. But that which, in a genuine sense, is sub- 
lime, we take to be constituted of vastness — a some- 
thing unknown or infinite, and, withal, an aspect of 
beauty. There is no grandeur unless there be beauty 
as well as largeness. 

795. It has often been questioned whether the as- 
pect of the starry heavens on a clear night is sublime, 
for it is said that it is magnificent rather than sublime. 
The heavens at night, as we ordinarily look at the 
vault above us, shows itself more as the ceiling of 
earth richly ornamented than as an unveiling of the 
universe of worlds. Feeling, as we do, that we ought 
to think it sublime, we have recourse to the aid of 
astronomy ; we look into books of science, and fill our 
thoughts with the details of the celestial arithmetic. 
But this factitious process poorly answers its purpose ; 
the human mind is not to be schooled into impressions ; 
it will not rebuke itself into admiration, nor be drilled 
in wonder. 

796. But if we can imagine ourselves to have dis- 
tanced this earth far enough to bring it into visual 
comparison with its neighbor planets ; if we could 
look round upon these spheres, each speeding away 
on its own year path, and could so think of this clus- 
ter as should aid us in looking outward toward the 
next proximate cluster ; and if it were granted to hu- 
man eyes to gaze upon the fields of the universe with 

O 



314 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

a consciousness of the millions of spheres, shining and 
shone upon, that crowd these spaces, then there would 
be no room for the question, Is the spectacle of the 
heavens sublime? 

797. After having thus glanced at the beauty of the 
visible world, and noted also the organic origin of those 
emotions which connect themselves with music, we 
reach the border of another subject, demanding to be 
considered by itself, namely, the relation of the hu- 
man mind to the unknown and the infinite. 



XXII. 

THE KELATION OF THE HUMAN MIND TO THE UN- 
KNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 

798. The relation of the human mind to the un- 
known and the infinite! What is it that we mean? 
It may be a real but an unconscious relationship, or it 
may be a real relationship of which all men have a 
more or less distinct consciousness, or it may be a real 
relationship of which certain classes of minds only are 
conscious, while others are not so in any sensible de- 
gree. We take it in this last sense. 

799. There are many to whom the very terms where- 
in we express the assumed fact of any such corre- 
spondence would be either an enigma or a subject of 
mockery. Just so it is as to the several branches of 
abstract philosophy, mathematical and physical ; for 
to very many around us this is a region unapproach- 
able, and an utter blank ; just so it is as to the bright 
fields of elevated sentiment — the world of taste, of 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 315 

feeling, and of poetry — to multitudes around us ; just 
so it is as to the regions of Art, to multitudes ; just so 
it is as to the loftier and more generous moral impulses, 
to many ; just so it is, to many, as to what Ave now 
affirm, namely, the relation of the human mind to the 
unknown and the infinite : it is as if it were not. 

800. Those to whom it would be so are found to 
occupy extreme positions on the intellectual scale, as 
thus : there is the very lowest and the most degraded 
order of minds, whether in the depths of civilized com- 
munities or in the wilds of savage life, whose eye, from 
youth to age, is never diverted from its earthward fix- 
edness ; then there are the frivolous, and the sensual, 
and the sordid, of whom there are many in every lux- 
urious community ; and then there are those who have 
reasoned themselves out of every belief, and have al- 
lowed sophistry and paradox to consume within them 
the very viscera of the moral life. 

801. Notwithstanding any such exceptive instances, 
or all of them put together, the human Mind does in 
truth stand in a real relationship to the unknown and 
the infinite, and of this relationship it has a vivid con- 
sciousness, unless, indeed, its genuine perceptions have 
been, as above said, overborne. 

802. It is on occasion of some contrast or some an- 
tagonism that the idea of this relationship most often 
presents itself. In search of an instance, we go back 
to the subject of the last section. The beautiful in 
Nature seldom presents itself otherwise than under 
some condition of imperfection and limitation. The 
flower-garden has its cankers, and its blights, and its 
fading and decaying splendors. The bright landscape 



316 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

of June suggests a contrast with the rigors and dis- 
comforts of February. The beauty of the material 
world is just bright and fair enough to stimulate that 
imaginative faculty the creations of which could never 
be acclimated to earth. So it is that this sense, which 
opens to us so much of pure and intense enjoyment, 
does not fail to suggest conceptions which can never 
be realized unless it might be in some brighter and 
distant sphere. From the cottage flower-garden, such 
as it shows itself on a summer's morning, there is a 
pathway which the imaginative man does not fail often 
to tread, leading to the unknown and the infinite, even 
to a world of absolute beauty, and of beauty never to 
decay. 

803. On a path that is still more direct, the human 
mind finds its way toward the unknown and the in- 
finite when we stand in presence of those objects in 
nature which give rise to the emotions of sublimity. 
In front of Alpine altitudes, with their vast upheaved 
masses, commingled cloud, rock, glacier, cataract, there 
is excited not simply admiration and awe, but there is 
a feeling that these terrestrial marvels are samples 
only, shown off upon this planet in order to suggest to 
man the idea of scenes in some other world still more 
stupendous. If earth has its Alps, and its Andes, and 
its Himalayas, what shall be the spectacle of awe which 
a world unknown might open to our gaze ? 

804. Telluric catastrophes, volcanic eruptions, earth- 
quakes, deluges, and whatever else combines ideas of 
destructive force with the conception of sublimity, has 
a further influence in carrying the mind, if it be sens- 
itive in this manner, into those abysses of imaginative 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 317 

terror where the unknown and the infinite may be con- 
ceived of as unveiling their powers to the utmost. 

805. There is yet a path which may "be trod with 
less trepidation, and with more fruit and advantage. 
The nocturnal heavens may at a first glance seem more 
magnificent than sublime ; but undoubtedly it is sub- 
lime when, by aid of reason, we penetrate this magnif- 
icence, and become cognizant of the reality which is 
beyond. Now there is here to be noted a change in 
our modes of thought which has been long in progress, 
and which is now advancing toward its consummation. 
This consummation will bring with it a consciousness 
of relationship to the unknown and the infinite of a far 
more substantial and impressive kind than hitherto has 
been admitted. 

806. The Hebrew lyrist, it is manifest, had, in the 
course of his midnight meditations, learned to penetrate 
beyond the visible screen, with its shining decorations. 
" When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fin- 
gers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordain- 
ed" — these modes of expression indicate what we might 
say was an astronomic conception of the celestial mech- 
anism or framework — a scheme of bodies in move- 
ment, in comparison of which vast masses and move- 
ments man and his petty fortunes seemed of small sig- 
nificance. But this same scheme, as to its vastness 
and these motions, was then unknown, and, as un- 
known, the starry heavens most fitly symbolized the 
divine attributes : they spake of God to man, and they 
set forth to his intellect and to his imagination the re- 
lationship of the creature to the Creator. 

807. This continued to be the ground or condition 



318 THE WOULD OF MIND, 

of astronomic sentiment among those cultured nations 
that had not admitted the scientific spirit, and that 
lived remote from the schools of philosophy ; but in 
other regions the abstractive faculty took the lead, and 
Science made its inroads, not only upon delusions and 
upon illusions, but also upon the ground of genuine 
religious sentiment and of (true) poetic "feeling. The 
advances of the strict and demonstrative sciences have 
a constant tendency to drive off from the field they oc- 
cupy, first, superstitions and popular errors, and then 
religious feeling. It is not because scientific discover- 
ies and demonstrated principles contain in themselves 
aught that is contradictory to a rational religious be- 
lief, but it is because the faculties which are called into 
exercise, and which are powerfully stimulated in the 
course of scientific pursuits, are antagonistic to feeling 
of every kind ; or, if they do not make war upon gen- 
uine and spontaneous emotions, yet they quash and 
neutralize them. 

808. A scientific age may, by chance, be also a re- 
ligious age ; but if the two powers are ever synchro- 
nous, it will be only because they occupy spaces in the 
community that are far remote from each other, and 
between which there is little or no intercourse. 

809. But in course of time, that which comes about 
is this : the discoveries of science and its ascertained 
facts make their way from the centre, where they orig- 
inated, outward and abroad among the people : first, 
it is the more highly educated that receive them ; and 
at length the broad popular mind admits and assimi- 
lates whatever philosophy in conclave has achieved. 
When this sporadic assimilation has well taken place. 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 319 

then the very facts which, in the process of their dis- 
covery and establishment, had driven off all feeling — 
poetry and piety — return to their place of rightful in- 
fluence in nourishing and in stimulating feeling, poetry, 
and piety. 

810. So it is with us just now. It is quite within 
a recollected time — a fifty years — that science has 
made an outburst upon the fields of infinite space and 
of infinite time. Although the modern Astronomy is 
of a much older date than this, it is only within this 
period that it has made sure what, in the last century, 
were little better than bold conjectures, and that it has 
established itself, and has won a firm position at a re- 
moteness in the universe which, although it be far be- 
yond the range of conception, is yet within the range 
of reason, and is cognizable, also, by the eye. 

811. As to that inroad upon the fields of unknown 
time which Geology has made, it is altogether recent, 
and that first consequence of a great scientific move- 
ment in the dissipation of ancient suppositions and the 
quashing of popular notions has not yet had its full 
course. A little while must still be allowed before 
geological science, and popular feeling, and genuine re- 
ligious conceptions can reach their due respective po- 
sitions, and regain the equilibrium that has been so 
much disturbed. Yet even now this perturbation is 
subsiding, and we are in near prospect of its perma- 
nent adjustment. 

812. Let Astronomy and Geology adjust themselves 
fully in relation to the cultured popular mind — let the 
latter especially forget its querulous mood of contempt- 
uous assault upon what it deems to be " ignorance and 



320 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

fanaticism," and then the tranquil result of discovery 
in both these fields — the astronomic and the geologi- 
cal — shall be of this sort, to take the first of these : 
On the field of the boundless celestial spaces, the 
known and the unknown, the finite and the infinite 
have been brought home to all instructed minds in a 
manner which is quite new as an influence, silently 
taking effect upon the human reason, and which is in 
course of greatly deepening and extending the most 
profound of its convictions. 

813. The surest of all the several modes of knowl- 
edge, namely, the eye, and the infallible methods of 
mathematical reasoning, combine to remove every shade 
of uncertainty or ambiguity from the celestial field, so 
far, indeed, as we may rightfully profess to have ex- 
plored it. Processes of reasoning, each of which is 
sure in itself, and is doubly authenticated by the co- 
incidence of different lines of proof, establish a belief 
which the eye, aided by the telescope, follows out and 
recognizes : it is Sense and Eeason together that carry 
us out to the orbit of the most remote of the binary 
stars, and that there give us an assured intellectual 
standing. But where is it ? The customary answer 
is, At the outskirts of the material universe, or near to 
its outskirts. But why do we thus assume that of 
which we have no evidence, but where, on the contrary, 
such evidence as we may find carries quite another 
meaning ? Two motives, but neither of them of a 
substantial kind, oppose our further progress. Project 
the right line ab from this, our solar system, to the 
most remote of the now-resolved nebulae. Then pro- 
duce it further in the same direction to c. Let bc be 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 321 

equal to AB ; and then why should we not assume as 
a fact that which is far more probable than the con- 
trary, namely, that this further line traverses spaces 
which are occupied, like the spaces measured by ab, 
with material bodies, shining and shone upon ? The 
two prejudices contradictory of this supposition are 
these: there is first that which rests upon the meta- 
physical axiom that matter can not be infinite, and 
therefore that it must come to its end somewhere ; and 
as well end itself at B, or a little way further on, as 
any where else. The second of these contradictions 
is purely of an imaginary kind, or we may say it is 
simply a prejudice of feeling. The human mind is 
aghast at the conception of material infinitude, and it 
craves permission to girdle creation somewhere — say 
a little way beyond the range of the telescope. 

814. We shall soon learn to get ourselves intellec- 
tually free from both these restraints, and then we 
shall come under the influence of a conception or an 
irresistible belief, which, although it can neither be ex- 
pressed in due form of words as a proposition, nor yet 
entertained as if we could grasp it, shall exert a great 
influence in ruling the conceptions of all minds that 
are capable of sustained thought. 

815. In like manner, the boundless or the infinite 
in Duration is brought home to us by the recent rev- 
elations of Geology. On this field, as on the fields of 
Astronomy, the known mingles itself by insensible 
degrees with the unknown and the Boundless, or the 
Infinite. Just as, in Astronomy, those facts, on the 
strength of which we travel out toward the infinite, are 
immediate objects of sight, so in Geology, those facts, 

O 2 



322 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

on the strength of which we go back toward an era in- 
calculably remote, are under the eye, and, moreover, 
they are in our hands. Palpable samples of organiza- 
tions that are too ancient for our arithmetic to express 
its terms in its customary symbols take their place in 
our museum alongside of the most recent exuviae 
These samples, although they are known and finite, 
yet in a true sense do they set forth the unknown and 
the infinite of the material universe ; and so the re- 
motest nebulae are known and finite, but they speak 
of that which is unknown and infinite in the conditions 
of the universe. 

816. The two great sciences, Astronomy and Ge- 
ology, which both of them may be called recent in re- 
spect of the long preceding ages in which they were 
not, are so far of unequal date as that the one of them 
has already worked itself into the popular mind, while 
the other is only beginning to lodge itself there. And 
yet the latest born has far outstripped the elder in one 
respect that gives it an incalculable advantage. It is 
Geology that — let the expression be admitted — has 
breathed a history upon the mechanism of the material 
universe, and has taught us, while looking at its seem- 
ingly unchanging features, to think and to speak of 
eras, and of beginnings, and of progress, and of con- 
summations. 

817. Astronomy long before had whispered the 
same truths, and had obscurely taught man to inter- 
pret the periodicity of the celestial motions in this very 
sense: "these all," it had said, " shall wax old as a 
garment, and shall be rolled up as a scroll ;" but Ge- 
ology has now spoken aloud of a beginning and an 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 323 

end, and in so uttering her voice has shown man that 
he himself had a destined moment in the evolutions 
of the planetary scheme. 

818. Yet this chronologic revelation has too recently 
been uttered to develop its meaning as related to our 
modes of thinking. This meaning is, however, coming 
to the surface, and the cultured popular mind will ere 
long accept it, and will then give it a place among 
universally-accepted and unquestioned principles. It 
is not merely a chronology of the planet that is spread- 
ing itself out before us in our museums — it is a scheme, 
and it is a unity of purpose, the issues of which have 
been foreshadowed from the very commencement ; it is 
a constant movement in which the human family is 
included, and the events of the last hour of which were 
typified at the very dawn of life. 

819. As if expressly for the purpose of excluding 
those vague suppositions which might grow out of 
these recent revelations of the boundlessness of the 
material universe, another revelation has run on con- 
temporaneously with them, namely, that of which the 
microscope is the instrument. The infinite of the ma- 
terial world is not — so the microscope teaches us — a 
confused vastness, but it is the infinite of perfection — 
perfection carried down to the dimensions of an un- 
dulation of light, or, it we please, to the diameter of 
the lenses of the eye of an animal, millions of which 
may be found careering in a drop of water. 

820. The proper theologic inferences that may be 
derivable from what is now understood concerning the 
infinitude of the universe are not our subject at this 
time. What we have to do with is the fact that the 



324 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

relation of the human mind to the unknown and the 
infinite has, in such a way, been now lately opened up 
by these two young sciences, Astronomy and Geology, 
as serves to give validity to a fundamental principle 
of a better logic, and to add confidence to the steps of 
those who, hereafter, shall advance upon the arduous 
paths of a higher and spiritual philosophy. This fact 
claims attention. 

821. Astronomy, as we have said, travels outward 
from its beginning on this planet, and it goes a long 
way forward into space upon a path that is solid as 
adamant, and it continues to move onward toward the 
unknown without a tremor, for at any moment it may 
securely trace its steps homeward. And in like man- 
ner the sister science, Geology, begins its boundless 
course, as we may say, in a garden, or in a gravel-pit, 
or by the road-side, or by the sea-side, and it goes on, 
risking no dangerous leap, attempting no flight, but 
treading forward in the midst of things that are visible 
and palpable, steadfast in its adherence to the surest 
principles of inferential reasoning : it goes on until it 
has made good a standing at a point so remote from 
the present moment that the mind averts itself from 
the thought of the awful intervening lapse of cycles 
of ages. 

822. Now the logical principle which grows out of 
these methods of reasoning may be imbodied in these 
three propositions : 

1. The Infinite, although it is not to be compre- 
hended by the human Reason, may be infallibly ap- 
prehended by it, or may be brought within its cogni- 
zable range, and may be known as unquestionable^ 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 325 

•though it is not known as to its constituents or its 

o 

conditions. 

2. It is a safe and sure course for the human Reason 
to take up any of the constituents or conditions of the 
human constitution, intellectual or moral, and to follow 
it out inferentially, even though it may lead us toward 
the unknown and the infinite. We may do this so 
long as each inferential step is itself a fact or a relets 
Hon included in that constitution. 

3. An inference may be admitted and relied upon 
as being itself a fact or a relation belonging to the 
human constitution, when, if we refuse to admit and 
to rely upon it, every kind of inferential reasoning- 
ought, at the same time, to be mistrusted and rejected. 

823. The human mind connects itself with the un-^ 
known and the infinite in various modes of undefined 
feeling, and of intuitive or irresistible persuasion. Man 
has ever recognized, in some form of belief, his rela- 
tionship to a world that is not cognizable by the senses. 
Toward these undefined impressions the mass of man- 
kind, in all countries and times, have shown themselves 
vividly sensible, and the multifarious superstitions of 
nations, ancient and modern, are so many products or 
consequences of this same consciousness toward an 
unearthly universe and toward unseen powers, benef- 
icent or the contrary. Of these many spurious phases 
of the religious consciousness we need take little ac- 
count at this time ; they would claim to be included 
in a comprehensive "Natural History of Religion." 
What is of far more significance is to note the now- 
advancing progress of thought, which is at work in 
combining our recently acquired knowledge of the In- 



326 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

finite in the material universe with that genuine and 
only theologic belief which is worthy of much regard 
— we mean the theology which modern nations- have 
derived from the Canonical Scriptures. 

824. As to all other beliefs, whether they be twen- 
ty or a hundred, they are museum subjects ; they 
should give occupation to philosophical antiquarian- 
ism ; but in any practical sense we have quite done 
with them, just in the same way as we have done with 
the Physical Sciences of antiquity ; they were good in 
their time, but that time is past, and they may be for- 
gotten. 

825. The only form of truth, moral and spiritual, 
concerning the Unknown and the Infinite which in 
this age we need to be concerned with in serious mood, 
has reached us in that one way which alone could give 
it fixity among the multifarious and interminable evo- 
lutions of Meditative Thought : it has come to us in 
the categoric or peremptory form of an attested utter- 
ance from the unseen world. Thus reaching us, this 
body of religious truth takes its position alongside of 
our modern Physical Science in this way : the two 
revelations — the Physical and the Religious — both of 
them lead on toward the Infinite and the Unknown, 
and both alike take their departure from that which is 
intelligible, and definite, and certain. Both alike are 
leadings forward from the less to the greater — from 
the Known to the Unknown, but they are not leadings 
from that which is sure and unquestionable toward 
that which is merely conjectural. 

826. Justly to be suspected, and indeed to be re- 
jected as utterly presumptuous and delusive, would 



THE UNKNOWN AND THE INFINITE. 327 

be any scheme which should pretend to bring in an 
aid from our recent scientific discoveries for the pur- 
pose of putting some new and more scientific construc- 
tion upon our Biblical Theology. Any such scheme 
would deserve its fate when speedily consigned to its 
place among ten thousand forgotten quackeries. 

827. That which may be looked for as likely to 
come about, and which would be beneficial in its ef- 
fects, is of this sort. In the prosecution of the mod- 
ern Physical Sciences the human mind has demon- 
strated the congruity of the human Reason with that 
Reason of which the material universe is the product ; 
for when we say that (within certain limits) we under- 
stand the scheme of the world as to its structure and 
as to its dynamics, we affirm that the mind which 
understands and the Mind which has produced this 
scheme of things are in unison, or that they are con- 
vertible the one into the other. 

828. It is an indication, or it is a consequence of 
this congruity, that the human Reason, following the 
least fallible of its means of knowledge, has lately ex- 
tended or expanded so immeasurably its personal con- 
sciousness toward Duration. As this consciousness 
is a prime distinction of the human mind — for man 
alone, of all creatures around him, concerns himself 
with the past and with the future — so is each exten- 
sion of this consciousness a note and a measurement 
of the advancement of the individual mind, and also 
of the advancement of races and communities. The 
wider the prospect which the individual man enjoys 
over the fields of Time, the greater is he in all his 
sentiments, and the nobler in his modes of action, and 



328 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

the less is he the abject and passive creature of the 
present hour. 

829. Now, on the ground of this principle, it is a 
fact worthy of all regard that the modern mind has in- 
calculably extended its view over the illimitable fields 
of Duration. This extension is not a vague appre- 
hension of countless cycles, but it is a strict measur- 
ing of times, either absolutely, as in the instance of 
the celestial revolutions, or relatively, as in the Geo- 
logical eras. The two sciences, together and separate- 
ly, invite us to tabulate the chronology of the universe, 
and they aid us in becoming familiar with dates, com- 
pared with which the human history fills only an hour. 

830. So it is, therefore, at this time, that thought- 
addicted minds are led out toward a position whence 
a prospect may be had upon which none but the inher- 
itors of immortality could dare to open the eye — nay, 
upon which no eye which is itself of short date would 
ever fix itself otherwise than with a vacant gaze. 

831. At this present time all things are conspiring 
to bring thoughtful minds into a new conscious rela- 
tionship with the unknown and the infinite on the field 
of Time. The deathless energies, the agonies ot hu- 
man affection, have always uttered an outcry for im- 
mortality ; it is the first need of the human heart. 
The moral instincts, unquenchably vivid as they are, 
have always demanded the future, and have told us 
that that future must be endless. The unspent ener- 
gies of Reason, full of force as they often are, even to 
the last moments of the animal organization, ask for 
the future, and could more easily accept annihilation 
now than imagine it as the end of a higher course. 



GENEKA AND SPECIES. 329 

The only theology which can he thought of as true 
affirms, and builds itself upon a boundless futurity ; 
and now, and as if it were the silent preliminary to a 
universal acceptation of this belief, the two surest and 
greatest of the Sciences are beckoning us to follow 
where they lead, even to a ridge whence man, immor- 
tal as he is, may take his range, this way and that, 
over boundless fields of duration, and may learn to 
know himself as the heir of an endless existence. It 
is thus, then, that the unknown and the infinite are 
now, in these last days, in course of opening their mys- 
teries to human thought and feeling, not on the un- 
fenced fields of metaphysical speculation, but on the 
charted pathway of direct knowledge and demonstra- 
tion. 



XXIII. 

GENERA AND SPECIES IN THE WORLD OF MIND. 

832. In that strict and unambiguous sense in which 
the terms Genus and Species are applied to the sev- 
eral kinds of vegetable and animal organization, we 
must not think of applying them to any of those dif- 
ferences which present themselves within the World 
of Mind. Organizations, vegetable or animal, are class- 
ified on the ground ot a sameness and a difference 
which are precise, and which are constant, and which 
are cognizable by the eye and the hand. But as to 
any differences that may distinguish mind from mind 
in the human family, although they may be great if we 



330 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

think of the interval "between extreme instances, it is 
so indefinitely bordered that only in an imperfect man- 
ner can it be kept apart from its confines above- it and 
beneath on the scale. 

833. It is, then, only in a less exact sense that we 
may speak of Genera and Species in the World of 
Mind. It is not as if the differences were not real, 
and some of them are very great ; but it is only when 
they are the greatest that we can mark them off with 
certainty. 

834. Two questions, each of them carrying with it 
some weighty consequences of a practical kind, meet 
us at the outset on this ground. The first of these 
questions relates to the difference between the Animal 
Mind in the orders around us and the Human Mind ; 
and we have to ask, How great is that difference, and 
what are the distinctive characters of the two ? The 
second question is this : Within the human family, or 
the several races that are allowed to belong physiolog- 
ically to the genus or the order Homo, are there any 
differences beyond those which should be regarded as 
varieties only, or as individual deviations from a com- 
mon type ? Or otherwise to put the question : Are 
the several races of the human family distributable 
into Genera and Species in respect of their intellectual 
and moral endowments ? 

835. Questions so grave as these would demand 
treatises for arriving at a conclusive, answer. Yet 
even in an elementary book they claim to be brought 
forward, and to be assigned to their due place in our 
compendium of the subjects belonging to Mental Phi- 
losophy. 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 331 

836. In regard to subjects of this kind, it is a mis- 
taken anxiety that would at all restrict the freedom 
with which we should discuss them, as if any conclu- 
sion we might arrive at, on either side, were likely to 
bring into jeopardy some article of our religious belief. 
Eeligious belief is indeed always endangered by igno- 
rance, by superstitious apprehensions, or by a blind 
dogmatism, but it can have nothing to fear from the 
calm and independent pursuit of truth in matters of 
Philosophy. 

837. In inquiring concerning the difference between 
the animal mind in the lower orders and the human 
Mind, we might be prompted by an ill-judging anxiety 
for securing the doctrine of the immortality of the hu- 
man soul to start with the assumption (wholly gratu- 
itous as it is) that the soul of Man, being a pure and 
simple immaterial substance, is necessarily immortal, 
for it is imperishable in its very nature. Then, hav- 
ing taken this hypothetic ground, and feeling a repug- 
nance to the doctrine of the immortality of the animal 
orders, we find ourselves compelled, by logical consist- 
ency, to affirm that these lower orders are not partak- 
ers of Mind ; that they have no soul ; and then our 
alternative must be this : that the animal mind is 
nothing more than a function of animal organization, 
or that consciousness and voluntary action are, what 
Materialists affirm them to be, products of the brain or 
of the nervous substance in the ganglia. 

838. But this is indeed a perilous admission. The 
indications of mind in the animal orders being such as 
they are, and touching so closely as they do upon anal- 
ogous facts in human nature, we shall find ourselves 



332 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

entangled in an utterly impracticable and hopeless ar- 
gument when we attempt to confute materialism as to 
human nature after we have conceded its main points 
in relation to the brute mind. 

839. The doctrine of the immortality of the human 
soul rests upon its own ground, and will be quite safe 
so long as it is left to rely upon its proper evidence. 
So far as religious opinions of any kind are implicated 
in scientific inquiries, it is of far more consequence to 
establish the great principle of the absoluteness of the 
difference between Mind and Matter than to insist 
upon a distinction between the higher and the lower 
orders of Mind, which, if indeed it could be established, 
would merge that distinction, and would hand us over, 
without help, to Materialism. 

840. Our assumptions are these : first, that the 
identity of the lower and the higher orders of Mind is 
such as to support the belief of the essential homogene- 
ousness of the two ; and, secondly, that the points of 
distinction between the two are so broadly marked and 
are so well defined that they must be held to indicate 
a generic and inconvertible difference. 

841. In the preceding sections we have stated what 
those points of identity are which support the conclu- 
sion that Mind is mind in all those orders of organ- 
ized beings that, by means of consciousness and vol- 
untary action, are qualified to defend and conserve 
their individual well-being. To those points of dif- 
ference which constitute the prerogatives of human 
nature we shall presently advert, but first may in- 
quire whether Mind, as developed in the animal or- 
ders, might be brought under any system of classi- 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 333 

fication, so as to be distributed into Genera and Spe- 
cies. 

842. We might, for instance, take, as the grounds 
of classification, the more obvious characteristics of the 
animal orders, considering them as distributable under 
such heads as these : the predatory and ferocious ; the 
insidious and wily ; the habitative and constructive ; 
the gregarious and ruminative, and the solitary ; or we 
might assume, as the basis of a broad distinction, the 
predominance of what we have termed Fixed Reason, 
or of its opposite, Free Reason. 

843. But now, on any such ground as this, the fact 
will present itself, that the Genera and Species of Mind 
in the animal orders are not conterminous with those 
distinctions of Genera and Species which have respect 
to external form and to organic structure. A mo- 
ment's attention to facts will show this : the animal 
orders of all classes are divisible into the consumers of 
vegetable substances and the consumers of the living 
substance. Now, to take these latter, the carnivorous, 
the predaceous, the wholesale swallowers of swarms, 
or the insidious en trappers of a single victim, we must 
run the round of the animal system, through the mam- 
malia, the birds, the reptiles, the fishes, the insects, 
the infusoria. An indictment on the general charge 
of inflicting death at the impulse of appetite embraces 
creatures of all varieties of form and functional struc- 
ture — the tiger, the pike, the lizard, the spider. 

844. If, then, we were to assume this predacity, 
with its fierceness of temper, and its remorselessness, 
and its wiliness, as a generic characteristic in the world 
of Mind, then, as we see, it must embrace very many 



334 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

orders, and genera, and species, such as they are class- 
ified by the Naturalist. The same fact presents it- 
self, whatever may be the disposition or the tendency 
which we take as the basis of a distribution into gen- 
era — it may be Constructiveness, or the gregarious in- 
stincts, or the domesticable faculty. We shall be 
driven, therefore, into the perplexity of a double scheme 
of classification, the one of which will nowhere be con- 
terminous with the other. 

845. The effecting of such a classification would be 
a worthy object of scientific industry, and those who 
addict themselves to Mental Philosophy would look on 
with animation while it was in course of completion ; 
but it is manifest that the grounds on which it must 
be carried out would he physiological much rather than 
intellectual or moral. The mental disposition — say 
the predaceous energy — indicates itself not merely in 
certain habits and modes of action when the prey is in 
sight, but by certain characteristics of the form, or, as 
we should call them, physiognomical analogies. The 
hyasna, the shark, the kite, will be found to be allied 
in facial contour or in some other, and perhaps more 
occult accordances of line and color ; and therefore it 
must be that, in the process of digesting a scheme of 
classification on the ground of mental identities and 
differences, we should at every step be led forth upon 
the path of Physiological Science : it would be from 
this field that we must gather the mass of our evi- 
dences. The task may be an inviting one, and by no 
means unimportant, but it is subject to conditions 
which barely consist with the style and usages of In- 
tellectual Philosophy. 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 335 

846. This passing reference to a large subject must 
be enough in this place. The first of the two ques- 
tions above stated demands more attention. The es- 
sential homogeneousness of the animal and the human 
Mind having been assumed, then the question presents 
itself, What are the precise points of difference between 
the two, vast as that difference is ? 

847. In the preceding sections we have incidentally 
mentioned the most obvious of these differences, and 
have spoken of them as "points of divergence" (Sect. 
XI.) of the higher and lower orders of Mind ; but per- 
haps they would more correctly be named points of 
departure ; for, in truth, wherever it is that the human 
Mind contrasts itself with the brute mind, there and 
thence it is that the higher mind starts forward upon 
an interminable path, leaving the lower mind forever 
fixed at the same spot. 

848. If we were to look, not so much to the inner 
causes of the difference between the two orders as to 
the consequences and the products of that difference, 
then these consequences challenge attention on that 
very ground where theorists of a certain class are apt 
to take their argumentative stand, and to allege that 
when Man — the savage, and while he is in what they 
would affirm to be his primitive condition — is brought 
into comparison with the nobler orders of animals, 
scarcely any advantage over them can be claimed for 
him ; on the contrary, the balance of good qualities 
and of well-doing is on the side of the perfectly condi- 
tioned and the rightly conducted quadruped. 

849. It is when we find him fallen into the depths 
of physical and moral perdition (which is never, and in 



336 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

no sense a primitive state) that we may with the full- 
est confidence predict for him a "boundless advance- 
ment, if only he can be led to set a returning foot upon 
the road of his better destiny. The brute never falsi- 
fies his destination ; he never fails to reach his ulti- 
matum of possible good ; but Man fails to do so, be- 
cause, while far more is possible to him' than is em- 
braced in any impulses which he shares with the brute, 
even his animal well-being is made to be dependent 
upon his pursuit of a higher good than that. 

850. Mind, in all orders, indicates the simplicity of 
its structure as well in its active as in its passive rudi- 
ments (268), and suggests the belief that it is One Ele- 
ment, or that a single principle is endowed at once 
with Power and with Sensibility toward the material 
world. Power introvertible, and consciousness in a 
reflective sense, may be universal properties of Mind, 
and yet may be feebly developed in the animal orders, 
while they are decisively developed only in human 
nature. So it is that those instincts which, in some 
orders, approach the border of the social affections, 
come to their end short of it. 

851. We have said (313) that there is nothing in the 
constitution of Man which has not been dimly sym- 
bolized in the structure of the lower orders, and this 
general principle holds good in relation both to body 
and mind. As it is with the emotions and affections, 
so is it with the intellect. That which develops itself 
with a boundless energy in Man just claims to be no- 
ticed as a rudiment — a mere germ in the structure of 
the animal reason. There is little, if any thing, in 
human nature of which we can be warranted in deny- 



GENEKA AND SPECIES. 337 

Ing absolutely the elementary existence in the animal 
nature. Not merely does Reason hold its sway in the 
animal world as a fixed product of Mind, a stereotyped 
mechanic process, but it rules also to some extent as a 
free force, adapting itself to the variable occasions of 
each moment. Nevertheless, there is a degree of de- 
velopment in the one nature of which nothing beyond 
a dim indication ever presents itself in the other nature, 
and this development affords ground enough, first, for 
the conclusion that there is a generic difference between 
the one and the other, and then for our after conclu- 
sion, that no such generic difference has existence 
among the several races of the human family. 

852. Of the difference between the rudimental or 
germ condition of a faculty, and the condition of the 
same when it is freely developed, we find an instance 
in that conscious individuality which results from our 
feeling toward the world around us as an independent 
and extraneous existence, to which the Ego stands 
opposed. 

853. In the animal mind, the ripening of sensations 
into perceptions is a process which seems to take place 
instantaneously, or nearly so, in the first moments after 
birth ; but with the human infant it results from a 
lengthened course of experiences, including frequent 
mistakes, and the slow correction of them, which bring 
about this same transmutation of organic sensations 
into their final state as cognitions of external objects. 

854. The relations of the animal well-being and of 
the animal agency toward the external world are few 
and uniform, but the relations of the human well-being 
(animal and emotional) toward the external world are 

P 



338 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

many and variable. Those objects around us with 
which we have most often to do, as desirable or as un- 
desirable, come before us under infinitely varied com- 
plications with other objects, and with our own feel- 
ings, and appetites, and purposes at different times. 
From these ever-shifting complexities it comes about 
that the very same objects are regarded- in a wholly 
different mood at different times, even within the com- 
pass of an hour. Hence it is that the human con- 
sciousness of the Ego congests itself into a ]p7*incipal 
consciousness, or a leading and a ruling mode of 
Thought, and this thought finds its counterpoise in 
the thought of the external world as related to our- 
selves and we to it, sometimes in one manner and 
sometimes in another manner. 

855. On this ground, then, there comes before us an 
instance of an incalculable divergence of the one order 
of mind from the other order, arising from a higher 
complexity in the structure of the one than is found 
in the structure of the other. While the habit is form- 
ing of regarding the same external object with varying 
feelings, the human infant is receiving its early lesson 
in the exercise of the abstractive faculty. 

856. But a still more advanced lesson on the same 
path is received when, in place of the external object 
present to the senses, the mind has to do with its own 
stored and much-intermingled conceptions of these ob- 
jects among which it exercises that disposing power 
which is its prerogative. The actual objects of the 
external world may affect us in several different modes, 
and they may find us in different moods ; but as to 
our treasured conceptions of such objects— these, sep- 



GENEEA AND SPECIES. 339 

arable as they are into their elements, and liable as 
they are to infinitely varied combinations, may, and in 
fact do, affect the mind in modes that are varied and 
changeful to an incalculable extent. It is among these 
gambols and fortuities of the conceptive faculty that 
the human mind learns to exercise its unconditioned 
control over the boundless stores of Thought. 

857. The point of divergence of the higher and the 
lower orders of Mind we have already considered in 
Section XL, and if the suggestions therein advanced 
were pursued to their extent, the difference between 
the two orders of Mind would present itself conspicu- 
ously. The conceptive faculty undoubtedly belongs 
to Mind in the lower orders, but there is little reason 
to think that a control over its combinations is exer- 
cised by them any more than it is by the human mind 
during sleep. 

858. But if this sovereign power has but once been 
exerted, then the emotional element — the intellectual 
and the moral — comes into play, and thenceforward a 
perpetual interaction is taking place between the free 
Mind Power and the emotional quality of those stores 
which the conceptive faculty is ready to supply in 
boundless abundance. So it is that, in the exercise 
of its liberty upon its materials, the human mind cre- 
ates its own world of feeling, whether it be pleasura- 
ble or painful, and it enters upon an interior life, in 
which the rudiments indeed are found in minds of in- 
ferior species, but of which no developments — no prod- 
ucts — present themselves any where beneath the hu- 
man level. 

859. The sports and gambols of the young of ani- 



340 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

mals are outbursts of superfluous or unoccupied mus- 
cular energy or unspent nervous stock. The sports 
and gambols of the infant Man have the same origin ; 
but the self-devised amusements or the pastimes of the 
human infant are utterances of that power by which, 
with incalculable velocity, the Mind fashions new worlds 
out of its own materials. The rude toy, the shapeless 
block, the tile, the brickbat, the pebbles, the straws — 
these are symbols, and each of them is, or may be, the 
representative of things large as worlds and bright as 
suns. 

860. It is from the readiness with which the Mind 
puts together anew the ingredients of the conceptive 
faculty that the Sense of Resemblance (400) is so oft- 
en and so easily awakened. Five straws have been 
brought into a certain juxtaposition upon the pavement 
by a gust of wind. In this inter-relationship of lines 
the human eye catches how many images of things 
great, remote, grotesque, supernatural ? There is, per- 
haps, a royal personage with his crown and sceptre ; 
or there is a volcano in eruption; or there is a ship 
driving before a gale ; or there is a pair of knightly 
foes intent upon each others destruction. Are there 
any facts on record whence we should be warranted in 
conjecturing that the most sagacious of animals de- 
rives any similar pleasure from a similar fortuity? 
We think not. But then we have in view a product 
of Mind, incalculable in its consequences, arising out 
of a complicity of faculties which belong, in their mere 
rudiments, as well to the lower as to the higher orders 
of Mind. 

861. We have briefly named in -the twelfth Section 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 341 

the Intellectual Emotions which prompt the human 
Mind to set forward upon those courses of intellectual 
labor of which Philosophy, and the Arts of life, and 
the imaginative arts are the product. The one char- 
acteristic of these emotions is this : that the exciting- 
cause — the object immediately pursued, and so eager- 
ly caught at when near at hand, is either something 
that is absolutely irrespective of the material well-be- 
ing, or it is related to these ordinary and lower inter- 
ests only in an oblique, indirect, and remote manner. 
It is the distinction of the human mind to follow, with 
the utmost intensity, objects which are situated quite 
outside of the circle of personal and common enjoy- 
ments. Mind, in the lower orders, gives no indication 
of being liable to impulses of this kind. 

862. This same distinction is broadly marked in 
relation to the social and cementing emotions and af- 
fections spoken of in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
Sections. In the lower orders, the social affections, if 
so we may call them, find their object among beings 
that are proximate both in time and space : it is one 
of the same species (with rare exceptions) now present 
and in view. Human affections, like electric influences, 
flow out to great distances with unabated intensity. 
Distance does not weaken them, time does not slake 
them. Human affection, whenever it rises above or 
goes beyond an instinctive fondness, draws to itself a 
force derived, though unconsciously, from the unknown 
and the infinite of a life hereafter. 

863. By introverted action — by the incessant re- 
volving of the elements of the past consciousness with 
the present and the foreseen future, the human mind 



342 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

learns, first, to contemplate the individual lot as a con- 
tinuous experience— a history, and then to think of 
the personal welfare of those most loved within its 
circle in the same historic sense. Human affections, 
therefore, are drawn out, without a weakening of the 
texture, to incalculable extents. The fibres of Love 
— sensitive in the highest degree — penetrate the dark 
future, as well as embrace all distances of earth. 

864. "When thus thought of, it is manifest that a 
vast interval separates the animal nature from human 
nature, even without including that which connects 
man with a moral and spiritual economy, and which 
would open before us an interval immeasurably more 
vast. There can then be no room for controversy — 
there is no pretext for paradox when it is affirmed that, 
as in respect of the intellectual faculties, so, and not 
less decisively, in respect of the social affections, a dif- 
ference presents itself between the lower and the high- 
er orders of Mind which is great, and is broadly mark- 
ed, and is constant also. In a word, the difference is 
not one of degree, but of Genus. 

865. Yet in relation to any practical inference, it is 
enough if we affirm only this — that Mind in human 
nature possesses an amount of introvertible or reflect- 
ive power so far surpassing that of the animal orders 
that the two natures are even more decisively contrast- 
ed in Mind than they are in visible form and structure. 

866. It is but at a few points that the human sys- 
tem infringes upon the great community of animal life 
in any mode of interference or invasion ; for if, indeed, 
that community could be numbered, then the few mill- 
ions that are annually devoured by man, and those 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 343 

that are reduced to servitude for his convenience, 
would seem too few to be much regarded : they make 
up, at the most, only a small exceptive case. 

867. None hut Oriental mystics, or the most whim- 
sical theorists among ourselves, have gone so far out 
of the road of common sense as to lodge a complaint 
against the lords of the world on the ground of their 
carnivorous practices, or of the task and service which 
is exacted of the horse, the camel, the elephant. There 
can he no need to enter into controversy with those 
who might profess doctrines so unsubstantial, and who, 
if they would be consistent, should devise means for 
spending their years on the summit of mountains, above 
the highest region of insect life. We take it for certain 
that, when the slumbering tenants of a hive are stifled 
in their beds, and when man converts to his " own use 
and benefit" the stores they have amassed, no wrong- 
is done ; there is indeed a spoliation, but there is no 
robbery. 

868. When Rights and Wrongs come into ques- 
tion, it must be among those who in mind are so far 
fellows as that the sufferers are competent to plead 
their own cause, and they may do this if indeed they 
have any consciousness of the wrong. It is not the 
dimensions of an os calcis, it is not a facial angle, it is 
not a prognathous profile, and certainly it is not the 
precise quality of the secretion in the rete mucosum 
that can be admitted to prohibit their urging the plea 
of justice on the ground of humanity, if themselves 
have any notion of justice. 

869. Nor is it any individual inferiority, whether as 
to the Reason or as to the Emotional sensibility, that 



344 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

can bar an argument of this sort. Trie inferiority of 
the infant, and of the aged, and of the imbecile, and of 
the sick, does not throw any shade of ambiguity upon 
questions of rights and wrongs. On the contrary, so 
far as a consideration of the helplessness that attaches 
to any such inferiority can be admitted to affect our 
conclusions, it must be, or it will be so with all but 
the basest minds — it must be to enhance the sacred- 
ness of those rights which the strong and the astute 
might be tempted to violate. 

870. There are two conditions which should attach 
to any inferiority, intellectual or moral, that is admit- 
ted as the ground on which the rights of humanity are 
denied to those whom the physiologist allows to be 
human. The first of these is this : that the alleged 
inferiority is so broadly marked as that it can be lia- 
ble to no uncertainty in single instances ; for if it be 
not thus clearly marked, then the strong and the ra- 
pacious will be prompted to adjudge such cases in their 
own manner. On such a supposition the foundations 
of human society would be shaken, for the feeble and 
the unwary would every where become the victims of 
the robust and the crafty. 

871. The second of these conditions is this : that 
the inferior race or the subjugated class should, by 
structure of mind — by its generic constitution, be in- 
capable of admitting and of harboring the conscious- 
ness of being the victims of a wrongful system, and 
should not be liable to any of those intense emotions 
that impel the sufferer to look upon the inflictor of 
suffering with hatred, and to regard him as an enemy. 

872. The reason of this second condition is obvious. 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 345 

A harbored hatred or resentment, prompting the victim 
to purposes of revenge, is a reciprocated feeling. The 
inflictor of suffering — the doer of a wrong, never fails 
to entertain a reverberative consciousness which in- 
spires him with terror, and which suggests to his fears 
measures of precaution and acts of intimidation. And 
thus suffering is added to suffering, and wrong is heap- 
ed upon wrong. It is a universal law that wrong is 
the first of a series of wrongs. Now it may be held 
as certain that we are running counter to the great 
laws of the sentient world whenever any suffering is 
inflicted which enhances and repeats itself in a geo- 
metric ratio. So much pain as is necessarily implied 
in the constitution of the world has this property, that 
it terminates in the instance — that it is not cumula- 
tive : its ratio is only arithmetical. 

873. What a world of bolts, and bars, and chains, 
and terrors — what a weapon-bearing and armor-wear- 
ing world this would be, if the sheep and bullocks in 
a pasture, if the geese on a common, if the poultry in a 
farm-yard, were always regarding the men and women 
about them as their murderers ! If the horse knew 
and felt what he does not know or feel, no horse could 
be put in harness until he had been schooled to sub- 
mission by red-hot irons applied in the stable ; and 
every saddle must be furnished with a revolver, to be 
used by the rider if his nag show temper. 

874. It is a fact full of meaning, that in every in- 
stance in which man sees it good to exercise the irre- 
sponsible rights of absolute property as to life or serv- 
ice over the animal orders, Nature has interposed an 
interval between him and them — in form, in modes of 

P2 



346 THE WOKLD OF MIND. 

life, and in instincts — in body and in mind — which is 
so "wide as effectually to exclude any possible mis- 
understanding, or questionable case in particular in- 
stances. The sheep, the ox, the horse, the bee — birds 
and fishes, as to all that are slaughtered and eaten, and 
as to all that are reduced to servitude, and as to all 
that are domesticated, there is a great gulf of Nature's 
own making between them and man. There are no 
midway cases that might be open to an argument. 

875. Full of meaning also is this fact, that as to 
those possibly questionable instances of approximate 
resemblance to humanity, such as that of the ape tribe 
in all its varieties, from the baboon to the chimpanzee, 
there attaches this conspicuous mark — it is Nature's 
cautionary brand — that they are revolting as food, and 
are inapplicable to any purposes of labor : they can 
neither be made to bear burdens nor practice handi- 
crafts : apt they are for mischief, but unapt for service : 
they are endowed with too much wit to be confided in, 
but they have not wit enough to be trained to any use- 
ful function. It is as if Nature had said to Man, "Be- 
ware of bringing humanity under brute law : you must 
neither slay for food, nor treat as a beast of burden, 
any species which resembles yourself, even remotely, 
in form and structure." Man must be careful to deal 
with his species on another ground, and altogether in 
another manner. 

876. Incalculable mischiefs — miseries that fail not 
to run out into crimes, and crimes which must repeat 
themselves in aggravated atrocities, would ensue if 
there were in any land a species, nearly bordering 
upon humanity and commingled itself with it, con- 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 347 

cerning which the question might be raised whether 
the sacredness of life and freedom of service should be 
recognized in and toward it or not. If once, on the 
ground of an apparent inferiority of race or genus, the 
rights of humanity should come to be violated toward 
such a race, then the most dire social confusions are 
let in upon a community, and devastate it as a deluge. 
In such a community, or in a nation thus cursed, civ- 
ilization will show its refinements side by side with 
the atrocities of the lowest barbarism. 

877. An invasion of the sacredness of life, or of the 
individual liberty of service, or a violence done to the 
sanctities of the domestic instincts — any such outrages 
as these, so long as the victims are of unquestioned 
equality in bodily and mental endowments (such as 
were mostly the slaves of ancient Rome), is indeed a 
grievous wrong, but it is a wrong that contains within 
itself a curative tendency. Man, in such cases, is 
seen to be treating his brother and his equal harshly 
and unfairly ; and some day — a day not in the extreme 
distance, the disputants shall come into contest on 
even ground, and the equilibrium of the social system 
shall be restored. In such instances great wrongs are 
done and great crimes are perpetrated ; but still Nature 
herself has not been blasphemed ; the Social system 
has been put far out of course, and its relations are 
hurtfully disturbed ; but these temporary and remedi- 
able evils do not go deep as a contempt uttered against 
those awful mysteries of the moral world — a contempt 
of which Nature avenges surely and without mercy. 

878. The belief that the several races of the human 
species have sprung from different sources, and that 



348 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

some of them are more ancient than others, is undoubt- 
edly suggested by a first view of the aspect of man- 
kind ; and even beyond this, such a supposition de- 
rives support from independent sources, physiological, 
ethnological, and psychological. The tendency of those 
who have labored to solve the problem on purely sci- 
entific grounds had, until of late, been toward this 
conclusion — that a distinct parentage should be claim- 
ed for four, five, or perhaps six of the now extant hu- 
man races. The contrary belief, which assigns all to 
the one paradisiacal pair, has been warmly affirmed by 
those who have imagined the credit of the Biblical his- 
tory to be in some manner implicated in the determi- 
nation of this controversy. 

879. But of late a reaction has had place in this 
controversy, and the present tendency is decisively to- 
ward the doctrine of a unity of origin, exclusive of any 
hypothesis that supposes a distinction of genus or spe- 
cies. Causes, the operation of which comes, to some 
extent, under our eye, are believed to be sufficient, 
when the lapse of ages is duly allowed for, to account 
for even the most strongly marked of these character- 
istics of races. 

880. So far as this problem is to be treated on phys- 
iological grounds, it stands excluded from these pages 
in express terms ; so far (if indeed this be the case at 
all) as the question is connected with Christian Theol- 
ogy, it would of course stand outside of an elementary 
book on Mental Philosophy. It may, however, prop- 
erly claim this passing notice when, as now, we inquire 
whether the upper order in the World of Mind be dis- 
tributable into Genera and Species. 



GENERA AND SPECIES. 349 

881. Mind, granting it to be one in essence, yet ex- 
hibits a difference, distinguishing the brute mind from 
the human mind, which is so great, especially if we 
follow it into its consequences, and the distinction is 
so fixed and so permanent, that it must be regarded as 
a generic difference of the most absolute kind. That 
it is so has this further confirmation, that the two or- 
ders do not approach each other on a marginal space 
by any ambiguous species. 

882. And here it should be well noted that instances, 
either of individual degradation, or of national debase- 
ment, or of the barbarism of tribes, have none of the 
characteristics of original specific distinctions ; all are 
manifestly the products of ill influences, of which we 
may watch the gradual operation, often among the mis- 
erable outcasts of humanity quite near to our homes. 

883. If, among the races of the human family, we 
were to take the most extreme cases of intellectual and 
moral dissimilarity, such as that of the modern Euro- 
pean, and the Papuan, or the Bosjesmen, it would not 
be necessary to travel a mile from our firesides, dwell 
where we may, to find individual contrasts fully as 
great. Nay, is it not so that, sitting around the same 
table, the types — intellectual and moral — of the Greek 
and of the barbarian, of the Scythian and of the Afri- 
can, may be pointed to ? Certainly it is so in any 
place wherein are assembled as many as a hundred 
persons, townsmen and cousins. 

884. Whether we take our instances from conti- 
nents, or from cities, or from near neighborhoods, we 
shall find it extremely difficult, or we may say imprac- 
ticable, to substantiate any hypothesis of classifica- 



350 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

tion ; that is to say, we shall not be able to circum- 
scribe any number of individuals with constant lines 
so as to distribute them into classes or species. Any 
such conjectural classification will be always breaking- 
clown under our hands, and melting itself away, until 
every aggregate has resolved itself into the individuals 
which compose it. 



XXIV. 

LAUGHTER AND WEEPING. 



885. It is with perfect strictness, in a scientific 
sense, that the Hand is affirmed to be the distinction 
of Man. When the Physiologist gives us this mark 
of humanity, he is thinking, first, of the relative posi- 
tion of the bones of the wrist and of the metacarpus, 
and then of the action and counteraction of the mus- 
cles which take their points of insertion upon these, 
and upon the rtlna and radius, and especially of the 
flexors and extensors of the thumb. So far we listen 
to the Anatomist and the Physiologist ; but beyond 
this we have to note the relation of this structure of 
the human hand — its bones, muscles, ligaments — to the 
Mind, of which the hand is the tool. We have to ren- 
der the Anatomical into the terms of the Intellectual ; 
we have to give the mental coefficients of the bony and 
muscular structure. Apart from his faculty of ab- 
straction, the hand of man would be an incumbrance ; 
deprived of his hand, the inventive power could only 
utter itself in petulant impatience, conscious of its want 
of a prehensive limb such as this. 



LAUGHTER AND WEEPING. 351 

). Now, in relation to the subjects before us, we 
have to go forward nearly on the same path. Laugh- 
ter and Weeping are incidents of the animal structure, 
and, as such, they are clearly distinctive of the human 
species : the Physiologist must give us his explana- 
tion of these two movements or agitations of the tho- 
rax and its apparatus, and show how it is that the 
diaphragm is affected, and the muscles of the chest and 
ribs, and then the pressure upon the lachrymal sac. 
Whatever we learn from him on this ground is wholly, 
or very nearly so, peculiar to the human organization. 
The Laughter and the Weeping of Man may, indeed, 
find a remote analogy in some of the brute orders, just 
as the human hand finds a remote analogy in the fore 
paw of the ape ; but the resemblance is not more than 
this. 

887. From the hand, which is at once the symbol 
and the instrument of Thought, we go up to that Mind 
which governs and employs it. And thus, from the 
Laughter and Weeping of Man, we go inward to that 
soul, the boundless emotions of which find expression 
in these convulsive motions. 

888. When the phenomena of Laughter and Weep- 
ing are taken out of the hands of the Physiologist, and 
are to be rendered into the terms of Mental Philosophy, 
we find it needful to distinguish, as to each of them, 
the more simple or organic from the more complicated 
or purely mental state of the feelings that are proper 
to each. Laughter, especially in infancy and childhood, 
is often an instinctive convulsion, expressive only of 
the exuberant joyousness — the pure consciousness of 
felicity — the perfect play and accordance of all powers 



352 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

of body and mind. Weeping, especially in infancy and 
childhood, is just the contrary of this sense of good; 
it is Nature's notice of some present pain or want. 

889. But beyond this elementary kind, as well of 
Laughter as of Weeping, we must consider each as 
the expression of emotions of a peculiar kind, and of 
more than ordinary intensity. The laughter of adults, 
when it is not (which it seldom is, unless with the im- 
becile) an outburst of animal joyousness, is the ex- 
pression of a sense which hitherto has been but im- 
perfectly analyzed or traced to its elements. That 
aspect of objects seen, or that apposition of ideas pre- 
sented to the mind by words, or spontaneously pre- 
senting itself, which provokes laughter, has a peculi- 
arity, marking it off very clearly from every other as- 
pect of things and from every other apposition of ideas. 
The subject is one of the most obscure within the 
compass of Mental Philosophy ; and because it is so, 
it could not, to any good purpose, be pursued, within 
due limits, in an elementary book. We mention it 
only in its bearing upon a subject which should not 
be passed over. 

890. The sense of wit and humor — the sense of 
the ludicrous, is called into action, so we usually say, 
by the sudden aspect or the flashing thought of some 
extreme contrast or misfitting, the accidental juxtapo- 
sition of things that have no proper coherence — no 
principle of unison. Yet it is not every or any sort 
of extreme contrast that excites laughter ; far from it ; 
some contrasts are purely painful. It is not merely 
the apposition of the small and the great, nor of the 
valuable and the worthless, nor of beauty and deform- 



LAUGHTEE AND WEEPING. 353 

it j, nor of virtue and vice, nor of well-being and mis- 
ery. Some other ingredient or adjunct is needed to 
constitute the ridiculous — to provoke laughter. 

891. There must be present in any such instance 
a moral element of some kind : we must have before 
us, whether actually in view or only thought of, a be- 
ing of like constitution with ourselves (or like so far 
as the particular occasion requires), to whom, as to his 
appearance, or his attire, or his behavior, there attach- 
es some extreme contrariety of which himself is, or 
pretends to be, quite unconscious. A mere derange- 
ment in the attire of a grave and official person, of 
which himself has no knowledge or suspicion, is enough 
to provoke the open or the smothered laughter of a 
thousand sober-minded spectators. The harlequin ex- 
hibits on his person some such incongruity ; and then, 
to give it force, he assumes an aspect of gravity, as if 
he had no consciousness of the fact that his appearance 
is absurd. A peculiar expression of care-worn gravi- 
ty it is which makes the antics of the monkey ludi- 
crous. Wit is the imputing to a person an inconse- 
quence or an incongruity, which is so glozed over by 
an artful commendation (implied or expressed) that he 
may be tempted to accept it unawares, and so be un- 
conscious of the ridicule to which it exposes him. 

892. Whether these explications may be accepted 
as true and sufficient or not so, this is certain, that the 
being who is provoked to laughter in sight of the lu- 
dicrous must himself.be possessed of mind enough to 
apprehend the tipper as well as the lower quality, from 
the contrast of which the sense of the ludicrous takes 
its rise. There must be a sympathy or a conscious- 



354 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

ness toward the great, the grave, the noble, in him, 
whatever may he the rank assigned him on the scale 
of intelligence, who is affected to laughter by the. sight 
of its juxtaposition with what is mean, ignoble, insig- 
nificant. The sense of wit — the sense of the ludi- 
crous, is a consciousness, not of one element, but of 
two, and of the upper one not less than of the lower. 

893. It is on this ground that we may confidently 
challenge humanity, with its entire circle of rights, its 
inherent dignity, and its recoverableness, if it has fall- 
en, in behalf of any race that laughs. 

894. If this be granted — and the more we pursue 
the principle into its source and its consequences, the 
more convinced shall we be of the validity of the claim 
— if this be granted as to the joyous side of humanity, 
a parallel claim will, with still more readiness, be al- 
lowed on the contrary side, and we shall be prompt to 
accord the sympathies, and the rights, and the dignity, 
and the redeeming qualities of humanity to any that 
weep. 

895. Again, we must take care to distinguish that 
which is organic from that which is more properly emo- 
tional. The shedding of tears with sobs is the char- 
acteristic of babyhood or childhood when it is the ex- 
pression of bodily pain at the moment. The weeping 
of the adult — woman, and it is still more so with man 
— is the product of emotions, whether of anger and 
petulance, or of grief; it may be disappointment, or 
wounded social affections, or loss of the loved, or loss 
of love itself. If laughter relate principally to the 
present hour or passing moment, weeping, when it is 
not simply organic, is retrospective chiefly. 



LAUGHTER AND WEEPING. 355 

896. Weeping, if it be of that kind which is prop- 
erly termed emotional, is of two kinds, for it is prompt- 
ed either by feelings that are personal and seclusive, 
or by such as are social and sympathetic. Not as if 
distinctions of this sort were entirely analytic ; yet 
they are sufficiently accurate to be available for the 
purposes now in view. Grief or sorrow, the spring 
of which is mainly or entirely personal, implies that 
ruminative habit of thought which brings the individ- 
ual lot — the individual fortunes and history, into per- 
spective, so as that it is contemplated from one point 
of view. The good and the ill of the personal history 
may give rise to feelings of remorse, or of resentment 
against those who have inflicted injuries: there may 
be the recollection of shipwrecked fortunes, of misused 
opportunities, of misjudgments, and of damage sus- 
tained by sheer fortuity. Whoever weeps in any such 
manner as these is the possessor of the elements of all 
degrees of moral culture, and he may well vindicate 
his claim to that treatment which is granted to be the 
right of the loftiest samples of human nature. 

897. Weeping at the impulse of the domestic in- 
stincts or of the deeper social affections — the cement- 
ing affections — gives a still higher sanction to the 
rights and dues of humanity. If the maternal in- 
stincts in brute natures show some approach to the 
warmth of human affections, they do but exhibit, by 
contrast, the far greater force and the enduring intens- 
ity of the latter. 

898. That which among all its elements is the most 
human in humanity is its affections — the social affec- 
tions ; or, to say all in a word, Love. Take a look 



356 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

round in any circle that may be inclusive of twenty 
persons. Admiration, and a willingness to follow and 
to be taught, goes over to that one of the company 
who is the most conspicuous for clearness and force 
of Reason, or for accumulations of available knowl- 
edge. But after this homage has been rendered to a 
faculty or a power which is bowed to because it can 
and it will maintain its own prerogatives, we turn — 
we do it involuntarily — to render a homage of far 
deeper meaning to the one, man or woman, in whom 
the social affections are pre-eminently developed. 
Love, when it is set as a jewel upon a healthy Reason, 
gives a title, which is never called in question, to the 
deepest reciprocative regard in all minds that come 
within its circle. The pre-eminence of Intellect is left 
to vindicate its own position in the regards of others ; 
but the pre-eminence of Love is assented to with 
so much the more readiness — with an instantaneous 
promptitude — on this very account, that it is not care- 
ful to assert itself; that it does not challenge its proper 
rights, and that it is not much disquieted even though 
they should be withheld. 

899. All — or all but the foulest natures — all render 
a willing homage to the social affections ; and so much 
the more readily do we all do so when the subject of 
them has come to be in a helpless social position. 
The tears that flow, either in the endurance or at the 
sight of an outrage done to the domestic affections, 
such tears burn themselves into that page whereupon 
all doings on earth are recorded which Eternal Jus- 
tice shall hereafter bring to a reckoning. When we 
say such things as these, we do not trespass further 



LAUGHTEK AND WEEPING. 357 

upon the ground of conjecture than this : we assume 
the fact that human nature is embraced by a Moral 
System, which is as broad as heaven itself, and which 
is more steadfast than suns are in their spheres, and 
which, at some epoch in the history of the human 
family, shall realize itself, with unfailing exactitude, 
in the destiny of every inheritor of an after-life. 

900. The faculty of speech in the human organiza- 
tion declares the social nature of man, for it has no 
meaning other than that which it derives from its re- 
lation to this sociality. On the very same ground, 
these two organic expressions — laughter and weeping 
—of two classes of emotions are sure indications of that 
same intention which places the individual man in cor- 
respondence and communion with his fellows. Laugh- 
ter and weeping are spontaneous utterances of vivid 
emotions, which, while they cement the social system, 
imply more than a bare relationship of mind to mind, 
for they suppose mutual dependence and obligation ; 
they suppose homogeneous moral elements, and a con- 
sequent reciprocity of rights and duties. 

901. It is not possible that we should always "laugh 
with them that laugh ;" but whenever we feel that we 
can not "rejoice with them that do rejoice," undoubted- 
ly there is something wrong, either on their part or on 
ours. We can not always "weep with them that 
weep ;" but whenever we fail to sympathize with such, 
undoubtedly there is something w r rong, on their part 
or on ours. On their part the sorrow may be quite 
imaginary, or it may have taken its rise in some wrong- 
ful assumption. But if the grief in which we do not 
sympathize be real and right, then this default of sym- 



358 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

pathy on our part must arise either from the callous 
condition of the social affections within us, or from the 
brutalizing effect of savage usages, in which we have 
always been accustomed to take a part, and to look 
upon with apathy. The consequent mischief, when 
it is of the first-named sort, is limited always ; for the 
individual who has thus been born out of the course 
of nature, bringing into the world with him the nerve 
and soul of the hyasna, soon comes to be outlawed by 
the contempt and dread of those around him. 

902. When the default of sympathy with genuine 
griefs, especially with those griefs that spring from the 
domestic instincts, arises, as we have said, from the 
brutalizing effect of barbarous usages in which, from 
childhood, we have been accustomed to take part, then, 
and in every such case, the " Social Institution" by 
which such usages are sanctioned, is itself A crime, 
and it will be germinative of crimes, until a community 
so deeply plague-smitten becomes the nuisance of the 
world. 



XXV. 

SUMMARY. 

903. We have affirmed (821) that the progress and 
the successes of the two recent sciences — Astronomy 
and Geology — have served at once to exemplify and 
to authenticate certain logical methods, and to give us 
confidence in applying these methods to subjects out- 
lying beyond the range of strict demonstration. We 
have said (823) that we may avail ourselves of such 



SUMMARY. 359 

methods safely and surely ; yet more than this might 
be affirmed, for these logical procedures are not only 
safe, but, as to a wide range of thought, they are our 
only mode of making any advance, in the way of in- 
ferential reasoning, beyond the point where we have 
the direct evidence of the senses. 

904. The Physical Sciences occupy, and explore, 
and cultivate an area which might be spoken of as an 
island lying midway in an ocean which, as to the hu- 
man intellect, is shoreless and fathomless. This terra 
cognita embraces just so much of the material universe 
as we become cognizant of by the senses, and by the 
most infallible kind of inference or induction. When 
we set a foot forward beyond the limits of what is 
known in this direct manner, and intend to make good 
an estate — a territory recovered from the wastes of the 
unknown, we are at every step compelled to trust to 
methods of reasoning which assume much that can 
never be made demonstrably certain, but which, whether 
it be strictly true or not, gives a sure support to our 
after-reasoning. 

905. All reasoning concerning Gravitation — all 
concerning the laws of light, as well as the entire 
scheme of our modern Chemistry, and the postulates 
of magnetism and electricity, together with what we 
take as our basis in Physiology — all these processes 
include hypothetic conceptions concerning the atomic 
constitution of the material world which are purely 
gratuitous, and the absolute truth or reality of which 
we can scarcely hope ever to ascertain. Nevertheless, 
it is enough if, after the jpetitio princvpii has been 
tacitly allowed, we go on to reason in a strictly infer- 



360 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

ential manner. If Light be an undulation, taking- 
place in a universally-diffused substance or elastic 
gas, then we may advance upon our path with a steady 
step in demonstrating the laws of this undulation. 
Yet it is a vast assumption that has, in this instance, 
been made at the outset ; but we know it to be an 
assumption, and it subserves our purpose, although of 
this elastic matter we have no direct knowledge, nor 
of these waves. 

906. The same kind of venture must be made — it 
is not a less venture, nor is it a greater — if we would 
make any progress in reducing vague, rambling, spon- 
taneous meditations concerning the Intellectual Sys- 
tem to any sort of order, or in giving our thoughts in 
this direction some coherence, and any thing of a sci- 
entific aspect. 

907. The first of these assumptions needful in giv- 
ing a scientific form to Intellectual Philosophy is that 
of the Reality and the independent existence of the 
Material world. We call this an assumj?tio7i, because 
to suppose that it may be shown to be true, or be 
demonstrated in logical style, is to suppose that we 
have the power to recede or ascend to a position an- 
terior or superior to our consciousness of the proper- 
ties of matter, so that we may look down upon this 
consciousness, and analyze it, and dispose of its ele- 
ments, and thus, perhaps, unfold the inner constitution 
of that which these elements may inclose. Nothing- 
remains for us in this case but the alternative either 
to allow the reality of the external world unproven, or 
to bring into question, on even grounds, the reality of 
the World of Mind ; and then, when we come to look 



SUMMARY. 361 

at the two hypotheses, each of them separately un- 
demonstrable, we shall find ourselves in a fit mood 
for admitting the last absurdities of universal skepti- 
cism ; or, rather, we shall have come into a state of 
mind so helpless and so hopeless that it may be called 
intellectual paralysis, a morbid affection which is in- 
curable. 

908. An admission of the reality of the external — 
the material world — carries with it, tacitly, an admis- 
sion of the reality of our own consciousness, which in- 
cludes the knowledge of that world. Then what is 
next needed as a basis of Intellectual Philosophy is 
a free and unconditional acknowledgment of the Real- 
ity of Mind as an existence apart from matter, and not 
partaking of any of its properties. 

909. Care and caution are needed on this ground ; 
and more than care merely, for we need a disciplined 
faculty of thought. What we have to assume or affirm 
is not the actual fact of the separate existence of Mind 
from matter, for of this we know nothing ; nor are 
we to affirm that Mind may release itself from its con- 
nection with a material organization, for this is a sup- 
position to which we have no means of giving support. 

910. What we have to affirm is simply so much as 
our consciousness attests, and in relation to which 
there can be no room either for demonstration or for 
doubt. I am conscious of Thought, Feeling, Power, 
and of Individuality ; but as to any imagined substance 
to which Thought, Feeling, Power, Individuality ad- 
here, and of which they are the products or the results, 
I have neither an acquired knowledge of it, nor any 
inward indication of it as a fact. 



362 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

911. Nevertheless there may be such a substance, 
albeit I have no knowledge of it, direct or indirect ; 
and this substance may possess solid extension : it 
may be an atom, indivisible, insoluble, and infinitely 
small, or it may be an ether or gas infinitely rare. 
But as to any suppositions of this sort, though they 
may seem to administer some ease to the imagination 
in its attempts to think of Mind apart from the animal 
structure, they can give us no aid whatever in our en- 
deavors to bring Intellectual Philosophy into form. 
On the contrary, suppositions of this class operate il- 
lusively, and they foster that tendency to philosophize 
upon the phenomena of Mind in the terms and style 
of Physical Science — a practice which has shed so 
much confusion upon this region of thought. If Mind 
be an ether, very rare and highly elastic, then, no 
doubt, it may have its vibrations, or its undulations, 
or its tremors, or its affinities with other rare ethers 
or gases, and so forth. But let any one who is ac- 
customed to sustained thought ask himself whether he 
can attach any meaning whatever, less or more, clear 
or obscure, to the terms and phrases of Physical Sci- 
ence, and the modes of reasoning concerning the prop- 
erties of Matter when they are applied to his own Con- 
sciousness of Thought, Feeling, Power, Individuality. 

912. We shall have set a good foot forward on solid 
ground — we shall have made an acquisition worth the 
labor it has cost us when we have brought ourselves 
to acquiesce fully and freely in the belief that Mind 
and Matter are both of them Real existences, not 
one the product of the other, but each absolute in its 
own manner. If we assent to this belief — knowing it 



SUMMAEY. 363 

to be a Belief, not a proposition provable — then we 
shall find that it serves us well as an hypothesis with 
which all facts, as well of physical as of intellectual 
and moral philosophy, perfectly consist ; and then, 
moreover, we shall feel ourselves relieved from the 
bootless labor of attempting to open up the mysteries 
of Mind by aid of the laws of matter, or of theorizing 
on the connection between the two worlds. 

913. We may take to ourselves this Belief with a 
feeling of comfort, and may then look abroad upon this 
vast scheme of twofold existence — the two worlds of 
Matter and of Mind — with a sort of expanded or 
emancipated consciousness toward the latter, that is 
to say, the universe of Thought, Feeling, Power, em- 
bracing the innumerable company of those who are 
individually possessed of sentient and causative ex- 
istence. Many questions, deep, perplexing, intermin- 
able, and unproductive also, start up, and would dis- 
turb our meditations when this boundless field is be- 
fore us. It might be asked, Whence and when do 
individual minds come up in the development of the 
great scheme ot organic animal life ? Are minds an- 
terior to organization ? Are they posterior to it ? 
May individual consciousness stand when animal or- 
ganization falls? In many forms might questions 
and surmises of this sort be fashioned ; but they have 
the loose quality of meditations ; they possess no sci- 
entific coherence ; they lie far outside the range of 
human observation or Reason. As to the bearing of 
these, or of any analogous speculations upon questions 
of Morality or Theology, nothing can be more unwise 
than to entangle the firm principles either of morals 



364 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

or of religious belief with films of conjecture such as 
these. 

914. A full, free, and unexceptive acceptance of this 
First Postulate of Intellectual Philosophy, namely, 
the absolute Reality of Mind apart from or irrespective 
of Matter, clears the way for an admission of its Sec- 
ond Postulate, namely, the Causative Property of 
Mind ; the term causative understood in a sense which 
at once distinguishes Mind from Matter, and which af- 
firms for Mind an unconditioned force as its primary 
rudiment. 

915. This second postulate must, like the first, be 
conceded as a Belief, and not as if it were, along 
with a multitude of propositions, sustained by a mass 
of evidence which yet falls short of demonstrative cer- 
tainty, but because itself stands anterior to every log- 
ical process : it is a Belief which, if we decline to ac- 
cept it, we are deprived not only of all belief, but of 
the very means of attaining any. 

916. In assenting to the First of these two Postu- 
lates, we simply abstain from affirming or denying 
any thing on ground where we have no knowledge. 
Thought and Feeling are utterly unlike any of the 
properties of Matter with which we are acquainted, and 
we rest upon this unlikeness as reason enough for not 
attempting to apply to Thought and Feeling the terms 
and methods of Physical Science. But now, as to our 
Second Postulate, we are safe in advancing a step be- 
yond any such negative affirmation or any such mere 
plea of ignorance. When we affirm the unconditioned 
Causative prerogative of Mind, and its absolute liberty 
as distinguished from physical causation of every sort, 



SUMMARY. 365 

we do lbut put into the form of a proposition a princi- 
pal element of Consciousness : we allege what we 
should never have thought of formally affirming, as if 
it might be denied or questioned, if we had not found 
ourselves encountered, in schools and in hooks, by the 
pedantic paradox which tells us that any such causa- 
tive liberty is inconceivable and impossible. 

917. The subsidiary attestations which may be lis- 
tened to, if we would arm ourselves against sophistries 
which we can not refute, are such as these. This Be- 
lief of the Causative Property of Mind, which is the 
primary dictate of consciousness, consists perfectly 
with each of those principal facts of human nature 
which, on the contrary supposition, are inexplicable 
riddles. 

918. This same belief comports well, to say no more, 
with the hypothesis of a Moral System and of a scheme 
of government founded upon Declaratory Law, not 
taking effect as a latent or physical law ; and when 
we affirm this as to a scheme of Moral Government, 
we affirm a portion only of a Great Truth — that Truth, 
namely, apart from a recognition of which there can be 
no Theology for Man, or none of which he may avail 
himself as the foundation of the religious life. 

919. Once and again (376 and 705) we have affirm- 
ed that in any instance, if a Belief is found to work 
harmoniously with the functions of human nature, such 
an accordance may safely be taken as an indication, or, 
indeed, as proof of its reality ; we may accept it as a 
truth, and need not suspect it as an illusion. Now on 
this ground we rest our Third Postulate called for 
in constructing an Intellectual Philosophy, namely, 



366 THE WOELD OF MIND. 

that in the original structure of the Mind there is 
nothing fallacious — nothing contrary to the reality of 
things ; nothing that is spurious or factitious, and 
which, when we come to he better informed, we shall 
reject or denounce as a disguise, of which the human 
race, or the uninstructed many, is doomed to be always 
the dupe and victim. 

920. It might seem superfluous to make a formal 
demand of this kind on behalf of the Creative Wis- 
dom, and yet, in fact, several schemes of Philosophy, 
ancient and modern, have implied the existence of some 
such delusion as attaching to the original framework 
of human nature. 

921. Take the instance of the momentary sympa- 
thies, and of those enduring affections which cement 
the social system. They are real, or, we should say, 
substantial as distinguished from animal instincts, 
which rise and disappear with the presence and re- 
moval of their immediate objects : they are real as dis- 
tinguished from all forms and disguises of the self-in- 
tending instincts and emotions, for they often impel 
the subject of them to courses of conduct that are di- 
rectly opposed to the promptings of those instincts. 
But more than this, these sympathies and these pro- 
found affections are Real, inasmuch as they connect 
Man with that universal scheme of Moral Government, 
his relation to which is vouched for by the firmest and 
the most enduring of his convictions. 

922. We have to make our choice between two in- 
compatible systems of Philosophy, or two modes of 
interpreting human nature. According to one of these 
systems, wherever there is the most feeling, the most 



SUMMARY. 367 

of sympathy (or the semblance of it), the greatest in- 
tensity of affection, or of what is imagined to Ibe affec- 
tion, there — and precisely in proportion to the warmth 
and the force of the emotion, is there the largest amount 
of artificial sentiment and of self-deception. Accord- 
ing to this Philosophy, he who imagines that he loves, 
not himself, but another, is, just so far as he indulges 
such an illusion, the victim of a conventional preju- 
dice, which it is the privilege of the philosopher to de- 
spise. 

923. But there is another scheme of human nature, 
and there is a more Positive Philosophy ; and accord- 
ing to this system, we take it as an axiom that, the 
more Feeling, so much the more Reality in every case ; 
the higher the intensity of the benevolent emotions, so 
much the nearer approach is human nature making to 
the great world of Love and Order. According to this 
Philosophy, the most false of all the false things on 
earth is a pure selfishness ; the greatest of all delu- 
sions, as well as the most fatal in its consequences, is 
that of the human being who makes himself his cen- 
tre, and his individual well-being his end. 

924. "What is here affirmed concerning the Sympa- 
thies, the Emotions, the Affections, may be affirmed 
also concerning the Tastes, and the Sense of the Beau- 
tiful and Sublime. There is a popular philosophy 
which resolves these Tastes into a complexity of asso- 
ciations, as if they sprang up out of nothing, and came 
to be what they are by endlessly multiplied reverbera- 
tions. It is as if we were to affirm that Daylight is 
the product of reflections from whited walls, and any 
other light-colored surfaces — chalk-hills, clouds, and so 



368 THE WORLD OF MIND. 

forth, instead of accepting the hypothesis that it reach- 
es Earth direct from the Sun. We challenge the sense 
of the Beautiful and the Sublime in this our Positive 
Philosophy as a faculty of the Human Mind, and which, 
while it is the source of inestimable enjoyments during 
our passage over this present stage, is indication of our 
relationship to a stage of things brighter and fairer 
than this. 

925. When we have conceded the above-named Pos- 
tulates of a Positive Intellectual Philosophy, we shall 
scarcely hesitate to concede that next demand of the 
same great principle, which is needed as the basis of a 
true Moral Philosophy, namely, this, that the Moral 
Sense is not a factitious conventional impulse, variable 
among the several races of the human family, and which 
possesses no constant authority, but that it is a faculty 
of human nature, and a sure indication of the relation 
of the Human Family to a system of universal and 
immutable Government. 

926. But these terms can have no meaning if they 
be taken apart from their implicit theological sense. 
In other words, a Philosophy of Human Nature can 
have no coherence until it embraces the First Princi- 
ples of a True Theology, and by this we can intend 
nothing else than a Christian Theology. 

927. Thus far we are entitled to go : we include 
nothing that is probable only, or that has the unfixed 
character of an excursion upon the fields of conjecture. 
Yet how easy would it be thus to pass beyond our 
strict bounds ! The very title of this volume might 
seem to convey an intention to attempt the unknown 
on the field of worlds remote from this. There is, in 



SUMMARY. 369 

fact, a warrantable range of meditative conjecture — 
there is ground for theoretic speculation as to orders 
of beings or modes of existence other than those which 
are limited by the conditions of the present animal or- 
ganization. The very structure of the material uni- 
verse seems to speak of modes of life — a lower and an 
upper ; an organization adapted to the alternations 
and the variableness of planetary temperature — light 
and heat ; and an organization adapted to the aeonian 
stability — the invariable day and summer of the solar 
surface. 

928. From all such speculations, and from others 
which it would be easy to indicate, we turn aside, and 
insist upon such things only as may claim to be re- 
garded as proper inferences from unquestioned facts. 
Resting upon the certainty of those methods of reason- 
ing which lately have carried the human reason out- 
ward toward the infinite of Space and Duration, and 
have given it a firm lodgment in the very midst of the 
unknown, we have said (822) that we may safely rea- 
son onward beyond the range of immediate knowledge 
when we take up any one of the constituent principles 
of human nature, and follow it out to its consequences, 
assuming only this axiom, that Human Nature is not, 
in its very structure, a fallacy or an illusion. 

929. The consciousness of Power as the first rudi- 
ment of Mind, and of Intelligence as the guide of its 
exercise — the consciousness of fitness and order, and 
the love and pursuit of good — these intuitions, apart 
from any logical processes, give us the conception of 
Supreme and unrestricted Power, and of Absolute In- 
telligence, and of Sovereign Goodness. If we could 

Q2 ' 



370 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

need proof that this inference is included in the frame- 
work of human nature, we should incline to appeal not 
so much to the universality and constancy of the .the- 
ologic belief, as to the laboriousness and the ingenuity 
of the endeavors that, from age to age, have been made 
by a few sophisticated minds to make the atheistic par- 
adox tolerable to human reason. 

930. Yet further. It is true as to the deeper and 
the more intense affections — it is true as to human love 
and hatred — it is true in what is tender and in what 
is cruel — it is true as to human purposes and ambi- 
tion — as to its projects and ends — it is true in hopes 
and in fears — it is true in whatever is generous, in 
whatever is the most dire, that these developments of 
human nature, as well intellectual as emotional, are 
never commensurate either with the immediate occa- 
sion or with the persons, the transactions, the incidents 
of the place, the hour, or the day. These evolutions 
of the human mind and soul are most often greatly out 
of proportion to the things to which they seem to re- 
late ; and especially true it is that the deepest affec- 
tions are regardless of Space and Time : in the purest 
Love there is a large ingredient of the infinite. 

931. Again, further forward we may safely go. More 
profound than even his affections, and more far-looking 
than his ambition, is that Moral Sense before which, 
when it wakes itself up, Man bows and quails, and 
confesses that he stands accountable to One greater 
than himself. 

932. An inference, then, which is not to be rejected 
unless we abandon the very ground upon which any 
and all reasoning must rest, is this : that whereas Mind, 



SUMMAEY. 371 

in the animal orders around us, is, with absolute pre- 
cision, related to the immediate occasions of animal 
life — Mind, in the human family, is not in any such 
manner related to the spot, and the hour, or the occa- 
sion, but is so constructed as to relate itself spontane- 
ously to a remote futurity and to an unknown stage 
of existence. 

933. When the world of Mind, as exhibited on the 
great stage of human affairs, is in view, and when the 
discouraging fact is before us of the very partial and 
exceptive development of the higher faculties of hu- 
man nature, we find the need of an explicative princi- 
ple such as has already been adverted to (452, and in 
Section XIII.). The human Mind contains no Law 
of Development taking effect as a constant physical 
law. Development of the faculties, intellectual and 
social, is, in every individual man, and in nations and 
races, contingent upon the presence and application of 
some exciting cause from without. 

934. At a first glance of the subject, the very con- 
trary of this might seem to be what we ought to look 
for. When we affirm, as we do, on behalf of the hu- 
man Mind, and affirm it to be its distinction, as com- 
pared with the animal orders, that it possesses an in- 
herent Causative Power — a spring from within, which 
sets it forward, or which may set it forward upon a 
course of boundless advancement, how shall we un- 
derstand the fact that development and progress are 
conditional and exceptive ? 

935. The expansion of the Human Mind does not 
take place uniformly and universally for this very rea- 
son- that a Causative Power having been conferred 



372 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

upon Man — and upon him alone, in the fullest sense, 
among the animal orders — no other provision has been 
made in his constitution for securing the development 
of his faculties. This inherent force is amply sufficient 
for this purpose, if only it be put in movement from 
without. An admirable mechanism is before us, but 
it is at rest, and it will forever remain at rest unless a 
finger — a force foreign to itself, give the start to the 
pendulum. 

936. The infant man is not only helpless as an an- 
imal, and absolutely dependent upon others for mere 
life — and he is so through months and years, but his 
Mind also must be nursed and evoked, or, if not, he 
will live and die in a condition far less desirable than 
is that of the orders around him. The fate of the in- 
dividual Man truly symbolizes the history or the fate 
of nations and races. A tribe — a race, marked as the 
same from age to age by its physical characteristics, 
occupies or roams about upon its unfurrowed allotment 
of territory through uncounted centuries. It does so 
until the day of awakening from without dawns upon 
it ; or, if no such day dawns, the race becomes extinct, 
or it gives room to another that itself has received the 
quickening visitation from a higher source. 

937. It is not then a paradox to affirm that that 
moral and intellectual degradation — that state of per- 
dition in which we often find Man individually, or na- 
tions — is the very ground upon which we rest our hope 
of being able to call him or it up to a higher place. It 
is the fallen who may rise. Barbarism is the condi- 
tion of tribes that either have wanted the initial move- 
ment of civilization, or who, having once, in some re- 



SUMMARY. 373 

mote age, possessed it, have lost it under pressure of 
material destitution or sudden catastrophes. 

938. But is the human family, as one, destined to 
advance or to recede on the road of moral and intel- 
lectual development ? A question, this, of great com- 
pass, and not, perhaps, of so easy solution on the fa- 
vorable side as at the moment we may be apt to imag- 
ine. The probabilities on the one side, and those pos- 
sible mischances on the other, which throw the shadow 
of a cloud upon the bright field of hope — these grounds 
of anticipation — embrace facts and reasonings, so many 
and so diverse, that scarcely any thing touching the 
past and the present condition of nations would be 
left out of the account. 

939. From so vast an argument as this we hold off; 
but it belongs to our theme, in this volume, to advert, 
in its closing pages, to a single element of the general 
subject. An argument concerning the probable des- 
tiny of the human family, vast and various as it is, yet 
converges toward a centre, and it offers itself to our 
view as if the materials were compacted around a nu- 
cleus. In attempting to find this central point, we 
may at once put out of view all calculation as to the 
possible advances of partially civilized nations ; for if 
indeed these, or any of them, shall at length be brought 
to occupy a higher condition than they have filled for 
many ages, such an event must be regarded as only a 
bright possibility on the remote horizon of the world's 
history. 

940. In like manner, and without giving way to 
any ungenerous prejudices, we may exclude from our 
calculations concerning the progress of nations those 



374 THE WOELD OP MIND. 

among them that, after centuries of probation, near to 
the broad daylight of intellectual, and moral, and po- 
litical advancement, still yield themselves inertly to 
superstitions and to despotisms which cramp and crush 
the soul, and which are now visibly mantling upon the 
spirit of the people, and bringing upon them a slumber 
of sensuous acquiescence in the fate which they can 
look at with apathy. 

941. In like manner, and apart from the influence 
of controversial prejudices, we may put out of view, on 
this ground, any communities, if any such there are, 
whose usages and whose institutions, the horrid relics 
of ages of barbarism and ferocity, sin flagrantly against 
humanity, and which, if they are still fondly clinging 
to them, brutalize even the better spirits among the 
people. Nature seals the doom of communities that 
set at defiance the primary instincts of the moral econ- 
omy. Decay, not advancement, is their inevitable 
future. 

942. The conservation of the bright destinies of the 
human family must be supposed to have been com- 
mitted to those nations or races that, beyond others, 
are the careful and courageous guardians of Liberty, 
Civil and Religious ; nations that, more than others, 
are alive to the claims of justice and of mercy ; and it 
is the same people that will be, although the faulty, 
yet the firm adherents of the only Truth, the Chris- 
tian system. 

943. Thus, then, our argument narrows its ground. 
We may, however, still find our way further in toward 
a central point. But here it should be understood that 
a centre may be such theoretically, and yet it may not 



SUMMARY. 375 

be the actual focus of light, heat, and force in the so- 
cial system. So it is in the instance before us. The 
actual focus of light, heat, and force within a free, a 
cultured, and a Christianized community, the very 
core of its life of thought and feeling, will be found 
many degrees remote from what we should call its 
theoretic centre. The theoretic centre of the national 
mind, in a country such as we are just now imagining, 
is the educated intellectuality of the people, or its Phil- 
osophic Creed — its holding on the ground of Abstract 
Principles. There is reason in the question concern- 
ing a People whose futurity we might be wishing to 
divine : What is its tendency, and its mode of think- 
ing upon the Primary Problems of the Higher Phi- 
losophy ? 

944. In the earliest pages of this volume the writer 
was careful to exempt himself from the imputation of 
attaching any exaggerated importance, in a practical 
sense, to his subject, Mental Philosophy. The world 
is ruled by forces that are far more substantial than 
are those of Intellectual Science. Nevertheless, In- 
tellectual Science must be allowed to have a real value 
of its own, and it would be a serious error to disallow 
its claims as a main element in education. These 
claims rise in importance when it appears that errors 
of malignant quality are rioting around us, and that 
they do so in default of that training of which a gen- 
uine Philosophy should be the guide and the impulse. 

945. Allowing, then, to Intellectual Philosophy a 
place of real, though not paramount importance in its 
bearing upon the advancement of a cultured people, 
and assigning to it its due position of honor as the 



376 THE WORLD OP MIND. 

theoretic centre of the national mind, there is reason 
enough for our wishing to see this branch of learning 
receiving improvements, and especially for d.esiring 
that its doctrines may be brought into conformity with 
Truths that are more sure than its own axioms. 

946. But this we may regard as certain, that Avhile 
the influence of Intellectual Philosophy upon national 
progress may never show itself to be much more than 
what is just appreciable, the reactive influence of na- 
tional progress upon Intellectual Philosophy will not 
fail to be beneficial in a very marked and decisive 
manner. Those, therefore, who are occupied in this 
department of labor may take the comfort of believing 
that, although they ought not to aspire to mend the 
world with their Philosophy, the world itself, if it be 
in course of improvement, will, at each stage of its ad- 
vancement, assuredly amend their Philosophy. 

947. The intellectual, the moral, the political (or 
economic) advancement of a nation, inclusive always 
of the steadiness of its adherence to Christianity, and 
its practice of the Christian virtues, will always be 
bringing before the popular mind some object of the 
highest moment and of the most urgent necessity re- 
lating to the welfare of the masses of the people. The 
energies of leading minds, borne forward by the force 
of practical good sense, will find, as if instinctively, 
the solid ground of truth in morals and in social sci- 
ence. There will be a diffused right reason prevailing 
throughout the educated classes which will effectively 
discourage and exclude vague and monstrous specula- 
tions concerning the first principles of human knowl- 
edge. If at this moment those spurious philosophies 



SUMMAEY. 377 

were to be named which, in times past and lately, have 
seemed to threaten morals and Religion, and to throw 
us (as to speculative belief) into the abysses of athe- 
ism or universal doubt, it might safely be affirmed, as 
to each of them in its turn, that, though it should 
never meet its overthrow in halls of learning, it must 
evaporate as a mist on the walks of life, if only men 
are moving forward under the guidance of those same 
unchangeable principles. 

948. Freed from paradox and unfathomable mysti- 
fications, and brought up from its metaphysic depths, 
and pursued and taught in the neighborhood of those 
great movements which must attend the progress of 
men in society, then, and while it is laid open to in- 
fluences of this salubrious order, the Philosophy of 
Mind shall perhaps win for itself a place much nearer 
than at present it occupies to the focus of light, heat, 
life, and power in the social system. 



378 THE WORLD OF MIND. 



NOTE. 

At the end of the Ninth Section there occurs a note 
in which I have expressed the intention of bringing 
into a Supplementary Section some facts of a mixed 
kind, physiological and psychological, illustrative of 
what is there affirmed concerning the development of 
mind in the animal orders around us ; but to be of 
much avail in support of the general argument, such 
illustrations must be much more copiously adduced 
than the limits of this volume will now admit. In 
truth, subjects of this class would best be treated by 
themselves, nearly allied as they are to those which 
are strictly proper to Animal Physiology ; for when 
they are associated with what professes to belong to 
Mental Science, the risk is great that a confusion will 
take place in the reader's mind, and he will find him- 
self insensibly drifting away from that which is pure- 
ly intellectual toward that which is organic and phys- 
ical ; yet to preserve inviolate the distinction between 
the two departments should be the earnest endeavor 
of those who undertake to write and teach on either 
side, and especially so on the side of the Philosophy 
of Mind. 



THE END. 



wm. 



iBS 



*~-a»g£-'- ^ <s > 



??>~^ 



baoesm^-- 



»* 












Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2004 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724) 779-21 1 1 



^ 






jgy.e -test:-. 
— leGSS-'^ - ■<««=- 










-'• sclF' 1 






'. ^jresSfelSw' r :.-." 






B v JpEr 






;«er<r 















^s*e- c 



' ■ssBT 



<2; 












LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



II ,!,..■ II; III llll llll 

013 177 436 9 




**fe 



ir«±^ 












:*^: 



HjSr 



J 



bk 



& 






^Eis^ 



"itf 






A^ 



i^Sr; 





£••£-" rf 




: NL: V 15 * 


■d? 






fflslk: < 




, 




Wi~'<- c 




■ 








m&a<,:-* 




Wj^- is '; 




m 




£se^«%' 


12 


mMM- 



:« J i 






